Call answering service costs UK: what 18 services charge

What a call answering service costs in the UK

Published monthly prices run from £14.99 to £635, and most of them are a bundle of calls or minutes with a rate above it: £1.50 to £2.99 a call, or 89p to £1.85 a minute. We read the pricing page of eighteen UK call answering services on 21 October 2026. Eleven print a figure, five publish none and ask you to request a quote, and two we could not read a price from on the day.

The figures below are the human-answered services, the ones where a UK receptionist picks up in your company's name. Every row is quoted from that service's own pricing page on the date above. We do not link to them, prices change, and a published price is a starting point for a quote rather than an invoice, so check the current figure on the service's own site before you compare.

Two of the eleven print a figure with no plan behind it. Too Many Calls publishes from £14.99 a month, the lowest monthly figure on this list, with a 30-day free trial and nothing on the page about what the month includes. Verbatim publishes a per-day figure rather than a monthly one, with a free 14-day trial, so there is nothing on its page that belongs in the columns below. Treat both as the start of a conversation rather than a plan you can price.

Which band you land in depends far more on how your plan is counted than on which service you pick. Two plans at the same monthly price can cover very different amounts of work, because one counts calls and the other counts minutes.

Plans priced by the call

A call is a call, however long it runs, which makes these plans the easier ones to budget.

Answer4u's bundles work out at the same £1.75 a call as its pay as you go rate, so the subscription buys you the allowance rather than a discount on it. Answer4u and Answerpoint both say there is no long contract, and Answerpoint publishes no setup fee. Answerpoint's own homepage advertises a lower starting price than its telephone-answering page, which is the page these figures come from.

Plans priced by the minute or the second

These are the plans where your bill follows how long people talk, and where a chatty caller costs you more than a brisk one.

Two details in that table move the real price more than the headline does. AnswerConnect bills in whole minutes rounded up, which means a 70-second call is charged as two minutes, and it does not charge for the first 30 interactions under 30 seconds in a billing cycle; its help centre also states a lower per-minute rate than the plans page these figures come from, so the rate you get is worth confirming in writing. Face for Business publishes its three figures as "from" prices, and its inclusive-minutes plan is the one that adds evening and weekend cover.

What 100 calls a month actually costs

Between £124.95 and £230 a month on the call-priced plans, which is the clearest like-for-like comparison the published prices allow.

The minute-priced plans cannot be put in that table honestly, because nothing on them counts calls. What they cost you depends on how long your calls run, and only your own phone records know that. Work it out in minutes instead: 100 calls that average two minutes is 200 minutes, which sits inside AnswerConnect's 250-minute Growth plan at £245 and over gtele's 110-minute Thrive plan at £100, where the next 90 minutes would be charged at £1.10 each. The same 100 calls at four minutes is 400 minutes, past every published bundle in the table above.

That is the single most useful number to pull before you ring anyone for a quote: your average call length, from your own phone bill. Without it, a minute-priced quote is unreadable.

What sits outside the monthly price

Six things, and they are where a cheap-looking plan stops being cheap.

• VAT. Most of these pages do not say whether the price includes it. Two state it plainly: Answer.co.uk quotes £2.20 a call plus VAT, and Officefront £25 plus VAT. On the rest, assume the figure is before VAT and ask.
• A setup fee. Published where it exists: £49.99 on two AnswerConnect plans and none on a third, £35 at Phoneta, none on the Face for Business Taster and none at Answerpoint. Several pages say nothing either way.
• How time is counted. Per second, per minute rounded up, or per call. Rounding up to the minute on short calls is the difference between a 70-second call costing one unit or two.
• The hours you are actually covered. Round the clock on some plans, 08:00 to 20:00 on another, weekdays 9 to 6 with Saturday 10 to 4 on another. Out-of-hours is where published prices diverge most.
• Messages and transfers. Emails and texts that pass a message on can carry their own small per-item charge on top of the call.
• The contract. Monthly rolling and "no long contracts" are common claims on these pages, and worth having in the written quote rather than on the marketing page.

Our own comparison of the three ways to get a phone answered puts the same prices beside a receptionist on the payroll, in receptionist vs outsourced vs AI.

The services that publish no price

Five of the eighteen we read publish no figure at all and ask you to get in touch: Moneypenny, Jam, Alldaypa, Lemon Contact Centre and FMMS. Moneypenny's telephone answering page says its pricing is flexible and based on your needs; Jam, Alldaypa and FMMS ask you to request a quote or arrange a consultation, and Lemon Contact Centre says only that its pricing is structured around the service it defines with you. Two more sites, we could not read a price from on the day we checked.

That is not a criticism, and for a bespoke contact-centre service it is often honest. It does mean you cannot compare them without a call, and that the quote you get is the quote you negotiated rather than a list price. Jam's page offers general guidance on what a UK minute costs rather than a price of its own, and the top of the range it gives is above every published per-minute rate in the table above.

If you are pricing the best-known name specifically, its own published figures and what sits around them are set out in Moneypenny alternatives.

How to read an answering service quote before you sign it

Five questions get a quote down to a number you can compare.

• Is this priced per call, per minute or per second, and how is part of a unit rounded?
• What is included in the monthly figure, and what is the rate the moment I go over it?
• Does the price include VAT, and is there a setup fee?
• Which hours does it cover, and what happens to a call at 2am on a Sunday?
• What notice do I give to leave, and does the rate change after the first term?

Then put your own average call length and monthly call count against the answers. Two quotes that look alike on the monthly line are often a long way apart once those two numbers go in.

Where an AI receptionist sits on this list

On the same pages we read, the AI plans mostly undercut the human ones, and they are metered the same way: a monthly bundle of calls or minutes, with a rate above it. That is the catch to look for, because the thing that makes a human answering service hard to budget is exactly what most AI plans copied.

We do it the other way round. Agent Place charges one flat monthly fee for unlimited agents, month to month. There is no bundle of calls or minutes and no rate above it: nothing extra per call, minute or message, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one, and any agent you add later sits under the same fee. Fully functioning and delivering value in 30 days guaranteed, or you pay nothing more until your agents are. We give you the price on the call.

What it does on a call is the part worth testing rather than reading about: it answers in your company's name, says it is an AI, answers what it has been told about your business and books people in. The demo in the rail of this page is a real agent on a real UK number, and the AI receptionist page sets out what it does and does not do. A longer comparison of the two models, where each one wins and where a human still beats an agent, is in AI receptionists against answering services, and what an agent of any kind costs to build and run is in what an AI agent costs.

Worth a 30-minute conversation

Tell us which of your calls you would like answered, and we will tell you on the call what we would build and what it would cost. If a human answering service is the better buy for your calls, we will say that instead.

One flat monthly fee for unlimited agents, month to month. Fully functioning and delivering value in 30 days guaranteed, or you pay nothing more until your agents are.