Updated October 2026. An earlier version of this note priced a voice agent on a machine in your own building. That is not what we sell as standard, so the note now works through the plans we do sell.
A meter and an asset behave differently over time. A metered service costs little on the day you sign and something every month after. An asset costs a lot up front and little after. For most small firms answering the phone, the meter wins, and this note shows why with the numbers written out.
The plans
The AI phone line runs on ElevenLabs Agents, on Ripeflow's own voice account. You do not sign up for anything or host anything. A person on our team loads your prices, hours and intake questions, connects your calendar, and your number forwards to it.
- $199 a month for up to 500 minutes, with no setup fee.
- $349 a month for up to 1,000 minutes.
- Extra minutes are 25 cents each.
Plans are month to month.
Three volumes
Small. Ten calls a day, about two minutes each, on weekdays. Call it 440 minutes a month. That fits the $199 plan with room left.
Medium. Twenty calls a day at two minutes, about 880 minutes. That is the $349 plan.
Busy. Twenty five calls a day at two minutes, every day of a thirty day month, which is 1,500 minutes. The $349 plan covers 1,000 of them and the other 500 are extra:
$349 + (500 x $0.25) = $474 a month
Against what you pay now
A live answering service with people in it typically runs $235 to $370 a month, with overage at $2 to $5 a minute. The base plan looks cheap and the overage is where the bill lives. Go and read last month's invoice before you compare anything. The gap between what people think they pay for call handling and what they pay is usually the biggest number in this whole calculation.
The other comparison is voicemail. If an average job or new client is worth $400 to you, one booked job a month that would have gone to voicemail covers the $199 plan. If you have never counted the calls you miss, count them for a week first.
When owning would make sense
At a few thousand minutes a month or more, a voice agent on hardware you own can start to cost less than a metered plan. There is a second reason some firms want that: the audio and the transcript would stay in the building rather than passing through a voice provider.
We can build that version. It is available on request and quoted per project, because the machine, the phone connection and the languages all change the number. For the volumes most small firms actually take, the monthly plan is the better buy, and if the review shows that, we will say so.
What the plans include
The agent answers only from the documents you give it: prices, hours, service area, policies, intake questions. When the answer is not there it says so and takes a message, books a time, or sends an emergency to your phone. It texts you about each caller.
English is the starting language. Other languages are added once we have tested them on your material.
The answer
Work out your minutes first. At a few hundred a month, the $199 plan almost always beats an answering service and beats voicemail on the first job it saves. At a thousand, the $349 plan. Only well past that is a private voice agent worth asking us to quote.