About Answering Service Quotes
An independent record of what US answering services and virtual receptionist providers publish about their own prices, quoted from their own pages and dated.
Why this site exists
This market sells minutes, and the number that decides your bill is rarely the number on the pricing page. An advertised plan buys a bundle whose size varies by a factor of ten between providers, and the rate for going past it is published by only five of the nine providers checked here. That is a defensible way to sell a service whose cost genuinely depends on how long your callers talk. It is also why a small business cannot get three comparable numbers without losing a week to sales calls. This site does the part that can be done in public: it reads each provider's own pages, records the figures they are willing to print, and records just as carefully where a provider prints nothing at all.
Who it is for
The owner or office manager of a US small business whose phone rings while nobody is free to answer it, and who wants to know what having somebody answer it actually costs.
Firms and practices weighing a message-taking service against a virtual receptionist against a call centre, who have found that the three price on different units and cannot be lined up without converting them first.
Anyone who has been told a price is available only after a sales call, and would like to know what the alternatives publish before taking it.
What it does not do
- We publish no estimate. A provider that does not publish a rate is recorded as publishing none, with the date we checked, and never with a guess that would place it in a position it has not earned.
- We do not treat an unreadable page as a finding. Where a provider's page could not be read, that is recorded as unread rather than as nothing published, because not knowing is not the same as there being nothing to know.
- We do not rank a best provider. What suits a law firm losing intake calls at nine in the evening is not what suits a consultancy taking fifteen calls a month, and a single ranking would hide the variable that decides the answer.
- We never let a commercial relationship move a provider up a table. Ordering is by published price and by nothing else, and a provider that publishes none is listed with that fact whether or not it pays us.
What is on this site
9 guides, each with its sources on the page , 82 answers to the questions around them , and the comparison.
- Answering services: "Answering services" covers three businesses that charge in completely different ways.
- Phone answering service: Choosing a phone answering service on price alone goes wrong because the price buys minutes, not outcomes.
- Call answering service: The choice between a call answering service billed by the call and one billed by the minute is not a detail, it is the whole cost model.
- Cheap answering service: The bottom of this market is not a cut-down version of the top of it.
- Small business phone answering: Most feature lists in this market are written for businesses much larger than the ones reading them.
- For small businesses: A dental practice, a plumbing firm and a two-person consultancy are all small businesses and none of them wants the same answering service.
- For attorneys: A law firm buying an answering service is almost never buying message taking.
- Mobile answering service: For a business run from a van rather than an office, the phone is not sitting on a desk being ignored, it is in a pocket under a sink.
- Virtual receptionists: The phrase virtual receptionist is used loosely enough to be unhelpful, but there is a real distinction underneath it.
Where the figures come from
Entry-plan prices (USD) verified against each provider's own pricing page on 2026-09-10 by infra/ingest/hubs/answeringservicequotes.com/ingest_vendors.py: every quoted figure re-fetched and matched verbatim (hash-pinned); class coverage evidenced by the provider's own live page for that trade.
Who answers for it
Joseph Ellul, Publisher; responsible for which pricing pages are read, how each figure is quoted, and for correcting anything on this site that misquotes a provider.
Reach us
Contact for a question about the site, or enquiries@answeringservicequotes.com. The legal terms are on Terms and Privacy.