Auto attendant vs answering service

The actual difference

An answering service employs human receptionists. When your phone rings, one of them picks up, speaks to your customer in your company's name, takes a message, qualifies the enquiry and often books an appointment straight into your calendar. Your customer has a conversation with a person who is not you.

An auto attendant answers with a recorded menu, asks the caller what they need, and rings the phone of the right person on your team. Nobody speaks to your customer except you and your colleagues.

There is now a third category — AI voice receptionists that hold a conversation with the caller. They are answering the call themselves, which puts them on the answering-service side of this line.

What each one costs

Answering services price by volume, and the two dominant models are per call and per minute. Both are published:

Scroll the table sideways to see every column.

Prices are the providers' own published list prices on the date at the top of this page; PATLive notes that "Prices don't include taxes and fees".2 These are two representative providers, not a survey of the market, and rates vary.

The arithmetic that matters is per call. Smith.ai's $300 entry plan works out at $10 a call, and the overage rate above the allowance is higher than the in-plan rate.1 Per-minute plans reward short calls and punish chatty ones: a five-minute conversation on PATLive's 200-minute plan costs about $8.75 of your allowance at the in-plan rate.

When routing is all you need

Most small businesses that look at an answering service need routing, and get sold the expensive option far too often.

• Your team can answer, they just need the call to find them. Most small businesses are not failing to answer because nobody is available; they are failing because everything lands on one person's mobile.
• You would rather talk to your own customers. For a lot of owner-operated businesses the phone call is the relationship, and outsourcing it loses something real.
• Your call volume is high and each call's value is modest. Per-call pricing is brutal here: two hundred calls a month at $10 each is $2,000 to route enquiries that a menu handles for a flat fee.
• Callers already know who they want. If most calls are "put me through to Dana", a human intermediary is a delay, not a service.
• You mainly need your personal number off the internet. That is a numbering problem, not a staffing one.

The combination nobody mentions

These are not mutually exclusive, and the hybrid is often the cheapest good answer.

Put the menu in front. Route the options your team genuinely answers to your team. Route the one option that must never be missed — new business, or emergencies — to the answering service. You pay per call only on the calls that actually reach it, which is the subset where a human is worth paying for, and you stop paying a receptionist to field calls from your own suppliers.

Businesses that do this typically cut answering-service volume substantially, because a large share of inbound calls are existing customers and vendors who never needed a receptionist in the first place.

The one-line test

Ask what should happen when a customer rings and nobody on your team can pick up.

If the right answer is "they should reach the right person, and if that person genuinely cannot answer, leave a message we will act on", you need routing, and that is what Auto Attendant does for a flat $29 a month per line.

Routing is also the cheaper place to start: it is set up online in the app, with no contract and no per-call charge. The guide to getting a business phone number maps every category, and the Google Voice alternatives article compares other routing services by price.