“What does an AI phone assistant cost?” is the most common question in the initial conversation, and the answer is worth breaking down concretely instead of dismissing with “it depends”.
The cost components
| Cost component | Typical range | What’s included |
|---|---|---|
| Setup (one-time) | €1,500–3,500 | building the knowledge base, aligning the conversation script, test phase, connecting the phone number |
| Ongoing operation | €150–400/month | hosting, monitoring, basic knowledge-base upkeep, support |
| Per-minute cost | often included in the monthly flat fee up to a volume, tiered above that | language-model and voice-synthesis cost per conversation minute |
| Maintenance & adjustments | partly in the flat fee, partly billed by effort | maintaining new prices, new services, changed rules in the knowledge base |
| System integration (ERP, calendar) | €500–2,000 extra, depending on complexity | write access to your ERP, calendar sync, invoicing system |
What drives the price
Three factors determine where you land in the range: call volume (more conversations mean more language-model minutes), the complexity of the knowledge base (simple scheduling is cheaper than an assistant that needs to know your entire service list with special cases), and the depth of system integration (just taking a message is cheaper than writing directly into your ERP with order creation).
An assistant that just takes calls and sends a summary email sits at the lower end. An assistant that books appointments directly into your calendar, creates orders in the ERP and handles several escalation rules sits at the upper end, but it also takes on correspondingly more work.
Hidden costs at cut-rate providers
With unusually cheap offers, a second look at the fine print is worth it. Common hidden costs:
- Knowledge-base upkeep extra: the base price looks low, but every change to prices or services is billed separately.
- No real ERP write access: the assistant takes calls but only forwards them as an email; the actual data entry remains manual work.
- Per-minute price with no cap: during a promotion or seasonal peak, the bill can unexpectedly explode if no cap is defined.
- No GDPR documentation included in the price: the data processing agreement and deletion processes are negotiated afterward instead of delivered from the start.
Comparison to an answering service and an in-house employee
An external answering service usually bills per call or per minute; as volume rises, costs rise linearly with it. A part-time employee just for answering the phone costs, roughly, from about €800–1,500 per month including payroll overhead, but isn’t available 24/7 and can’t handle any number of calls in parallel. At medium to high volume, the AI phone assistant is often clearly below both alternatives, because costs don’t rise linearly with every additional call.
Worked example
A trade business estimates around 40 calls a month that it currently misses. Setup: €2,500. Ongoing cost: €300/month including ERP integration. If the assistant additionally answers 28 of these calls and, at a 25% close rate, that leads to seven won jobs at an average order value of €750, that’s €5,250 in additional order volume per month; at €300 in ongoing cost, the setup is mathematically earned back within a few weeks. The numbers are a model, not a guarantee; we build your own calculation in the free potential assessment.
If you want to know what an AI phone assistant would actually cost for your business, the free potential assessment is the fastest way to a real number instead of a range.