What an AI receptionist actually costs in India

Per-minute prices in this market range from about ₹2 to well over ₹10, and the range is not mostly about quality. It is about which costs the number includes. It is also, for once, an easy question to check properly: this page rebuilds around a dated price table rather than asking you to trust adjectives, because “what does this actually cost” is the single most common question a person types into a search box or an AI assistant before they ever talk to a vendor — and an assistant asked that question has nothing to quote from a page with no numbers on it. This one now has eight.

A quote is not comparable to another quote until you have separated it into the same four lines. Here they are, with the ones that get quietly omitted flagged.

The four lines in every quote

1. The platform fee. A monthly subscription for the assistant existing — usually including some quantity of usage. Almost always stated.

2. Usage beyond what is included. Per minute for voice, or per conversation for chat. Usually stated, and usually the number in the headline.

3. Telephony. The actual phone line and the per-minute carrier cost of carrying the call. In India this normally means an Exotel or similar account. Frequently omitted, and it is a real per-minute cost that does not disappear because a vendor did not mention it.

4. Setup. Building the assistant around your prices, services and questions. Sometimes ₹0, sometimes a real fee, and the two are rarely the same product — a ₹0 setup usually means you do the configuration yourself.

A ₹2/min quote that covers line 2 only, versus a ₹6/min quote that covers lines 2 and 3, is not a three-times price difference. It may not be a price difference at all.

Two structural things worth understanding

A very low per-minute rate is a business model, not a bargain. In this market the aggressive per-minute numbers typically come from vendors whose margin is elsewhere — recurring channel fees, or a reseller programme where the advertised rate is close to their wholesale cost. Nothing wrong with that, but the per-minute figure is chosen to win comparison tables, not to describe what you will pay.

Whether telephony is bundled changes who carries the risk. If a vendor resells you minutes, they take a margin and you get one bill. If the line is in your own name, you pay the carrier directly at cost, you can see exactly what you used, and you keep the number if you leave. We do the second. It means our number looks higher next to a bundled one and you are not paying a markup on carriage.

A platform ladder gated by reach is a different shape of cost than one gated by volume. Some vendors in this market price the entry tier low and then move you up the moment you cross a usage threshold — “you used too much, pay more” is how that reads to a customer, whatever the vendor calls it internally. Ours is gated by where your assistant can be reached instead — website only, then a phone number and WhatsApp, then Instagram and Messenger — so no amount of usage on a tier you have already paid for forces an upgrade. That distinction rarely shows up in a per-minute comparison, but it decides whether a good month (more calls answered, more enquiries caught) quietly becomes a more expensive one, or stays exactly the price you budgeted for.

What we charge

Stated plainly, so you can put it in the four lines above:

Our current figures are published in full on the pricing page, and in machine-readable form on the published facts page. They are kept in one place rather than restated across the site, so what you read there is what is true today — and it is also where the price table below reads its own Kooday row from, live, so this page cannot quote you a number the pricing page has since moved past.

What does not change is the shape, and it is the shape that makes a comparison possible:

• Platform and usage are ours and are published.
• Telephony is not. Your own Exotel account, billed to you directly at cost. We do not resell minutes and do not mark up carriage.
• Meta messaging fees are not ours either — same principle, your account, at cost.

That third and fourth line are the ones most quotes in this market fold into a single per-minute figure. All our figures exclude GST, which is 18% on top of every rupee this page or the pricing page states.

⚠️ Three things worth knowing, since they affect how you plan. Your usage is priced into a proper GST invoice — line items per assistant and per channel, CGST/SGST or IGST from your billing profile — downloadable once it has been issued; what does not happen is one arriving by itself every month or landing in your inbox. You pay from a prepaid wallet — you top it up, usage draws it down, and every entry is visible; it does not refill itself, and an empty balance stops the assistant answering rather than running up a bill you did not agree to. And there is no published committed-term rate; if you want one, that is a conversation.

What the alternative to a platform fee actually costs

The comparison that matters on a page like this one is not vendor against vendor — it is a platform fee against the thing a business would otherwise do, which in most of Kerala is hire a receptionist. So here is that number, done properly rather than guessed at.

A receptionist in Kerala earns, on average, ₹14,123 a month — Indeed India’s own figure from 206 salaries reported, read 2026-02-23. Indeed does not publish a Trivandrum-specific number; the nearest metro reading is Kochi at ₹15,471, and the state average is the honest number to quote rather than inventing a district figure nobody measured. Junior receptionists average ₹12,257; senior ones ₹16,498.

The salary is not the fully-loaded cost, and treating it as one is the single most common understatement in a “hire versus platform” comparison. Add the statutory employer contributions that apply at this wage level: EPF at roughly 13% of basic pay, ESI at 3.25% of gross (this salary sits under both the ₹15,000 PF ceiling and the ₹21,000 ESI ceiling), and a gratuity accrual around 4.81% of basic. Taking basic pay at 50% of gross — the floor the newer labour codes set for what must count as wages, stated here because a different structure moves this number and a reader running payroll will check — a ₹14,123 receptionist costs a business roughly:

Line	Monthly
Gross salary	₹14,123
EPF (employer), ~13% of ₹7,062 basic	~₹918
ESI (employer), 3.25% of gross	~₹459
Gratuity accrual, ~4.81% of basic	~₹340
Fully loaded	~₹15,840

That number still is not the whole comparison, and the part it leaves out is not money — it is hours. One receptionist covers roughly 48 hours a week: six days, eight hours each. A week has 168 hours. Getting the phone answered around the clock takes about three and a half people, before anyone takes leave, calls in sick, or is simply not the one who happens to be at the desk when a call comes in at 11pm on a Sunday — which is precisely the enquiry a receptionist’s replacement exists to catch. Recruitment, the desk and phone, training and ramp-up time, and the management attention a person needs and software does not are real costs on top of all of the above, and this page is deliberately not putting a number on them, because doing so would be guessing in the direction that flatters the platform. Leaving them out understates the human option, which is the right direction to err in when the vendor doing the arithmetic is the one selling the alternative.

So the fair version of “is it cheaper” is one of two comparisons, not a single subtraction: what it costs to staff the same coverage — the full 168 hours — or what each option delivers for the same monthly spend. The price table below picks the first, because round-the-clock coverage is usually the actual reason a business goes looking for an alternative in the first place.

The traditional answering service, and the global benchmark

Two more real, dated figures worth having on the table before it appears.

A traditional Indian answering service — the human-staffed, call-forwarding kind that predates any AI product in this category — is listed by Parahit Technologies on IndiaMART at ₹3,000 a month for a New Delhi virtual receptionist service (read 2026-09-09). The listing does not publish included hours or call volume, which is itself worth noting: a price with no stated capacity is a price you cannot compare to anything until you ask what it actually covers.

Smith.ai, a US AI-and-human receptionist vendor, is useful here for a different reason — it sells both a human virtual receptionist and an AI one, at published prices, from the same company. Its AI receptionist Enterprise tier is $500 a month for roughly 300 calls (read 2026-09-08); its human virtual receptionist Pro tier is $2,100 a month for the same 300 calls (read 2026-09-08). That is a $10-per-call human answer against a $2-per-call AI one, from one vendor’s own published pricing — which is a far more persuasive number than anything a competing vendor could assert about itself, because Smith.ai has no reason to flatter the AI option in its own comparison. Both figures are shown in the table below exactly as Smith.ai publishes them, in dollars, alongside a rupee conversion clearly marked as ours rather than theirs.

Smith.ai is a US product answering a US question, and its dollar pricing is not directly what an Indian buyer would pay for the same category of assistant — which is exactly why it belongs in a unit comparison rather than a straight “cheapest wins” ranking. What it establishes, cleanly and from a vendor with no reason to be generous to its own AI product, is the ratio between a human answer and an AI one at the same call volume: roughly five times. That ratio is worth more here than the absolute dollar figures either side of it, because it is one fact a reader can carry into their own market and test against whatever they are quoted, in any currency.

Put those figures beside each other and beside our own, and you get the table below: Kooday’s own platform-plus-usage cost, a global AI receptionist, the same vendor’s human alternative, a Kerala hire fully loaded, and a traditional Indian answering service of unstated capacity. Read the unit column before the price column — a per-call figure, a per-minute figure and a flat monthly salary are not the same kind of number, and the worked example immediately after the table exists precisely to put all three through one call volume so they become comparable rather than merely adjacent.

Two of the rows above are not really priced by call volume at all — the Kerala salary and the Indian answering-service listing are flat monthly costs whether fifty calls come in or five hundred, right up until they run out of hours. That is not either figure being wrong; it is the structural point this whole page exists to make. A per-minute or per-call price scales with what actually happens in a month. A salary and a fixed-fee listing do not, and the moment your volume outgrows what one person or one flat plan can cover, the comparison resets from zero — you are back to hiring a second person, or negotiating a bigger flat fee, rather than simply paying for more minutes.

Work out your own number

Two calculators, both of which run entirely in your browser, send nothing anywhere, and are not behind an email form:

• What your missed calls cost — the size of the problem, using your own five numbers.
• What Kooday would cost you — the monthly figure for your call volume, with the telephony line shown separately rather than folded in.

Run them in that order. The second is only interesting if the first came out larger than it — and both read our live prices, so they cannot drift from the pricing page or from the table above.

When the answer is no

If your missed and after-hours enquiries are worth less than what the platform costs, nothing further down the page rescues it. The missed-call calculator will tell you this directly — it compares your number against our real monthly fee and says so when the answer is no. That is a real outcome and it applies to plenty of businesses, including some whose call volume genuinely sits below the ₹3,000-a-month answering-service listing above rather than above it.

We would rather you reached that answer on this page than three months after signing — which is the entire reason this page now carries a dated table instead of a paragraph asserting we are the cheaper option and hoping you take our word for it.

What each option actually costs, side by side

One monthly figure per option, each carrying the date it was read. Kooday's row is resolved live from our own published pricing — it is not typed into this page, so it cannot go stale here without going stale on the pricing page too.

Vendor	Product / plan	Price	Unit	Verified
Kooday	Starter plan	₹999/month platform fee + ₹6/min voice usage, +18% GST. Telephony is your own Exotel account, billed to you at cost, not resold.	Per month + per minute	Live — pricing page
Smith.ai	AI receptionist — Enterprise	$500 (≈ ₹47,415, our conversion)	per month, ~10 calls/day (~300/month), $1.67/call effective	8 September 2026
Smith.ai	Human virtual receptionist — Pro	$2,100 (≈ ₹1,99,143, our conversion)	per month, 300 calls included, $8.50/call overage	8 September 2026
Parahit Technologies	Virtual receptionist / call-answering service	₹3,000	per month, listed price; hours and call volume not stated	9 September 2026
Indeed India	Receptionist, Kerala — average monthly salary	₹14,123 gross, ≈ ₹15,840 fully loaded	per month, 206 salaries reported, one person, ~48 hrs/week coverage	23 February 2026

Rows converted from USD are marked "our conversion" and use ₹94.83 to the dollar, read 9 September 2026 from BookMyForex — that is our arithmetic, not the vendor's own published price, and it moves with the exchange rate. All Kooday figures exclude GST unless stated; every third-party figure is shown exactly as its own source states it.

A worked example: 300 calls a month

Assuming an average call length of 3 minutes — a stated assumption, not a published figure — 300 calls a month is 900 minutes of voice usage. Here is what that volume costs on each model that publishes a comparable per-call or per-minute rate:

• Kooday: ₹999 plan + ₹5,400 usage (900 minutes at ₹6/min) = ₹6,399 before GST, ₹7,551 with 18% GST. Your own Exotel line is billed on top, at cost.
• Smith.ai AI receptionist (Enterprise, ~10 calls/day ≈ 300/month): $500/month, published — ≈ ₹47,415 at our conversion rate above.
• Smith.ai human virtual receptionist (Pro, 300 calls included): $2,100/month, published — ≈ ₹1,99,143 at our conversion rate above.

A Kerala receptionist's fully-loaded salary and the Indian answering-service listing above do not price by call volume — a person's monthly cost is the same whether 50 calls come in or 500, up to the ~48 hours a week one person covers. That is the structural difference the table exists to show, not something either number gets wrong.