A front-desk hire covers 40 hours. Your phone rings for 168.

Sunday night you had two tabs open. One was a job post for a front-desk person, half written. The other was an AI receptionist pricing page that said $149 a month. The math looked too easy, so you closed both and went to bed. Monday at 7:40 a.m. the first call of the week went to voicemail because you were loading the truck.

The question is not AI or a person. It is which hours of the week you are paying to cover, and which jobs besides the phone you need done. A full-time hire covers 40 hours. Your phone rings across 168. Price those separately and the choice usually makes itself.

The salary is the smaller number

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median receptionist at $18.27 an hour, or $38,010 a year, as of May 2025. The lowest tenth earned under $13.83 an hour. The top tenth earned over $24.01. Your town sits somewhere on that range, and you already know roughly where.

That $38,010 is about $3,168 a month before you owe anything else. The employer half of Social Security and Medicare is 7.65%, which adds about $2,908 a year. Now you are near $40,900, and you have not priced workers’ comp, state unemployment insurance, paid time off, a phone seat, a computer, or the two weeks you spend training someone who may leave in six months. Those vary by state and by business, so we will not guess them for you. They are not zero.

A person covers a quarter of the week

Forty hours is 24% of a week. Take out lunch, a sick day, and a vacation, and it is less. The hire answers the Tuesday 10 a.m. call that you could have returned at noon anyway. The 6:45 p.m. call about a water heater, the Saturday morning call about a dead AC, and the 2 a.m. call about a backed-up drain still go to voicemail.

For a business with a counter and a lobby, that is fine. The rush happens while the doors are open. For a field business, the calls that cost the most are the ones that come in when nobody is in the office: before eight, after five, weekends, and every hour you are on a job.

What the monthly plans actually buy

Answering plans bill for talk time or calls, not for a person’s presence. That is why they look cheap next to a salary. They are also not doing the same job. These are the current dollars on the Counter & Crew tool cards, and the full list sits in the AI receptionists aisle:

• Rosie Professional is $49 a month for 250 minutes and texts a booking link. Scale is $149 for 1,000 minutes and is the first plan that books on the calendar and transfers live. Twelve months of Scale is $1,788.
• Frontdesk is $99 a month for 200 voice minutes, then $0.25 a minute. AI only, no human behind it.
• Goodcall Starter is $79 a month with unlimited minutes, but it meters 100 unique callers, then $0.50 each.
• Smith.ai AI Pro is $150 for 75 calls. Human Starter is $300 for 30 calls, and call 31 is $11.50.
• Ruby is live people from $250 for 50 minutes, rounded up to the minute, with $5.40 a minute over on that plan. The $720 plan is 200 minutes.
• AnswerConnect is live people from $350 for 200 minutes, with a 90-day minimum in the terms.

Prices move. Read the card before you buy.

None of these will chase an unpaid invoice, call back a quote from last week, or greet someone at the counter. They pick up, take the details, book or transfer if the plan allows it, and tell you. That is a narrow job. It is also the job that loses you work when it does not happen.

Where the hire wins

The hire wins when the job is bigger than the phone. If you need someone to schedule the board, take payments, enter jobs in Jobber, follow up on estimates, and greet people walking in, software covers one piece of that list. An auto repair counter or a dental or med spa front desk has walk-ins all day, and a person at the desk is the product.

The hire also wins on volume during business hours. Run Smith.ai’s human plan to the median monthly wage: $300 for the first 30 calls, then $11.50 a call, crosses about $3,168 at roughly 280 calls a month. That is about 13 calls a workday, which one person can handle between other tasks. If you are past that and the calls need a human, per-call human answering costs more than a person in the seat during the day.

And a person learns your customers. After a month they know which landlord always calls on Fridays and which homeowner needs a callback before 8 a.m. A model learns what you write down for it.

Where the hire loses

The hire loses when your calls cluster in the hours they will not be there. A one-truck plumber does not need someone sitting by the phone at 10 a.m. on a slow Wednesday. They need the 7 p.m. call picked up and the job details written down. Paying $40,000 a year for coverage that ends at five is paying for the wrong hours.

It also loses when the real problem is the ring you miss while you are under a sink. That is often a text-back problem before it is a voice problem, and text-back costs less than either.

Most businesses end up with both

The setup that holds up is a person, or you, during the hours someone is in the office, and an AI receptionist or answering service on overflow and after hours. The person owns the board. The software catches what rings while the person is busy or gone and leaves a note where the person will see it in the morning. If you are still deciding between an AI and a live service for that second layer, AI receptionist vs live answering service covers it, and after-hours call coverage covers the nights.

Do this before you post the job

1. Pull 30 days of calls from your phone system. Count them by hour of the day and day of the week, and mark which ones were missed.
2. Draw a line at your office hours. Count the misses inside the line and outside it. If most misses are outside, a hire does not fix them.
3. Write the job list besides the phone: scheduling, payments, data entry, estimate follow-up, walk-ins. If that list is short, you are hiring a phone.
4. Price the hours separately. Daytime coverage against a wage in your town. Nights and weekends against the plan that fits your call count, using the per-minute or per-call overage, not the headline.
5. Before you sign a plan, call your own number after hours and see what happens. If the caller hangs up confused or the note never reaches you, it does not matter what it costs.

If you would rather not be the person who sets up the after-hours layer, book a fit call or see nationwide installs. We pick the plan for your call count, wire it to the line and the board you already use, and leave. If you already hired someone and the nights are still leaking, email support@counterandcrew.com.