One flat monthly rate — $29, $99, or $249 — and every paid plan answers every call 24/7, books the job, and captures the lead. No per-minute meter ticking while a caller talks, no setup fee, no contract. Start free for message-taking and FAQs, or talk to us about a custom Enterprise plan.
Penny answers every call and takes a message on every plan — paid plans add appointment booking, lead capture, your tool integrations, and more talk time. Start free on a real phone number, and only pay once Penny is earning her keep.
Billed annually — about ~17% less than month-to-month.
Includes 60 minutes/mo · billed annually
Includes 220 minutes/mo · billed annually
Includes 625 minutes/mo · billed annually
Penny answers any call night and day, handles your FAQs, and takes a message — then emails you the details the moment they hang up. No card.
Appointment booking & lead capture begin on Starter; integrations on Pro.
Start freeHigh call volume or many locations? We’ll build a custom plan around how you work.
Billed annually on a custom contract.
Talk to salesAll plans: no setup fees · keep your number · cancel anytime.
Most ways to answer your phone bill you for time. A human answering service charges per minute or per answered call, so your bill climbs with every busy week — a storm, a heat wave, a tax-season rush, and the invoice follows. A virtual receptionist works the same way: you pay for the hours someone spends on your line.
Penny is priced the other way around. The work happens in software, so you pay a flat monthly rate and the price doesn’t move when your call volume does. The 2 AM emergency, the Saturday quote call, and the lunch-rush overflow all cost the same as a quiet Tuesday afternoon — nothing extra.
| How you’re answered | Who answers | How it bills | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Penny (AI receptionist) | Software, answering in natural speech | Flat monthly rate, generous minutes included | $29–$249/mo |
| Virtual receptionist (human) | A remote receptionist on a shared team | Per minute or per answered call — your bill scales with volume | $250–$1,700+/mo |
| Answering service (human) | A call-center agent who takes a message | Per-minute or per-call blocks, plus overage | ≈$10/call or $1.85–$2.50/min |
Human prices are dated and sourced on the answering service cost guide — provider by provider, with every number linked to its source.
Every paid plan — Starter, Pro, and Business — answers, books, and captures the lead the same way; the bigger plans simply include more minutes, the CRM and field-service connectors on the roadmap for Pro, and a few extras for multi-tech teams. (The free plan answers every call too — it takes a message and answers your FAQs with 30 minutes a month, but appointment booking and lead capture start on Starter.) Here’s what’s in all three paid plans.
Penny picks up in one ring — nights, weekends, holidays, and overflow during the day. No voicemail, no busy signal, no after-hours upcharge.
She checks your live availability, books the job straight into your calendar during the call, and emails you the booking.
Name, number, address, and the reason they called — captured on every call, with a summary emailed to you the moment they hang up.
Penny answers in English today; bilingual English-and-Spanish answering — detecting the caller’s language and switching mid-call — is on the roadmap at no extra charge.
A genuine emergency or a “get me a human” gets gathered up and warm-transferred to you or your on-call line, with the details passed ahead.
Robo-dialers and wrong numbers don’t earn your attention — Penny screens them out so your call log is only the calls that matter.
Google Calendar from Starter, so Penny books into the calendar you already use. Deeper connectors — Outlook, Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more, plus Zapier — are on the roadmap for Pro, so leads will land where you already work.
Get a dedicated local number or keep your own and forward your line, with step-by-step carrier guides. No hardware, no code.
The bigger plans add more included minutes and a few team extras — multiple numbers and locations, priority support — but the way Penny answers, books, and captures the lead is identical on $29 and $249. (The free plan books and captures on the call too — it just has 30 minutes a month and no tool integrations.)
67% of U.S. adults don’t answer calls from unknown numbers (Pew Research, 2020) — so when you call a missed lead back the next day, you’re now the unknown number they ignore, and the job has often already gone to whoever picked up live. The Starter plan is $29 a month. For most trades, a single service call you’d otherwise have lost to voicemail pays for the plan many times over.
That’s the whole pitch: Penny costs less than one missed job a month, and she’s built to make sure you don’t miss it. No per-minute meter to watch, no surprise overage in your busy season — just a flat rate that answers every call.
This is a live line answered by Penny herself — not a recording. Hear how fast she picks up and how she handles a real conversation.
(630) 297-4128Still doing the math? Call the demo line and ask Penny what she costs.
The receptionist essentials are in all three paid plans — Starter, Pro, and Business: 24/7 answering, appointment booking into your calendar, lead capture with an email summary on every call, warm transfers, spam screening, and a dedicated or forwarded phone number. They differ mainly by how many minutes are included ($29 for 60 minutes, $99 for 220, $249 for 625), plus the deeper integrations and team extras on the bigger tiers: Google Calendar sync is on Starter, while CRM and field-service connectors (Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more) are on the roadmap for Pro. Spanish answering and text summaries are coming soon across all plans. The free plan answers every call too — it takes a message and answers your FAQs with a custom greeting — but it’s capped at 30 minutes a month and doesn’t book appointments, capture leads, or connect to your other tools; appointment booking and lead capture start on Starter.
If you use more than your plan’s included minutes, extra minutes are billed at a flat per-minute rate — $0.48 on Starter, $0.45 on Pro, and $0.40 on Business. There’s no penalty rate and no rounding games: you pay for the minutes you use beyond the plan, and if you’re consistently over, moving up a tier is usually cheaper than paying overage.
No setup fee, no contract, and you can cancel anytime. Penny is month-to-month. That’s a real difference from some human services — AnswerConnect, for example, lists a $49.99 setup fee on some plans (as of June 2026). With Penny, the monthly price is the whole price.
There’s a free plan, not just a trial. The Free plan answers your calls, takes a message, and answers your FAQs with a custom greeting — 30 minutes of talk time a month, free forever, no credit card. It doesn’t book appointments, capture leads, or connect to your other tools. When you want appointment booking and lead capture, the Starter plan is $29 a month (CRM and field-service connectors are on the roadmap for Pro), and you can set it up and take real calls before you commit.
A human virtual receptionist bills for time — typically per minute or per call — so the cost depends on your call volume. Human services run roughly $250–$1,700+ per month depending on minutes, and per-call services land around $10 per answered call (as of June 2026). Penny is a flat $29–$249 a month no matter how many calls come in, with 24/7 coverage in every plan. See the answering service cost guide for a full, sourced, provider-by-provider breakdown.
Because there’s no staffed seat behind every call. Human services pay trained receptionists across nights, weekends, and holidays — that overhead is what pushes per-minute rates to $1.50–$2.50 and makes 24/7 coverage start around $300 a month (as of June 2026). Penny answers in software, so round-the-clock coverage is built into every plan instead of being a premium you pay for the hours you’re asleep.
If they ask, yes — Penny says she’s an automated assistant. She never pretends to be a person. We think that honesty is the right call, and in practice callers care far more that someone answered, took them seriously, and got their details down than about who picked up.
Give Penny your number and let her answer the next call. You’ll have her booking jobs before your coffee’s cold.