What AI Automation Costs a Service Business, Including Our Prices

Most AI vendors show you one number. This post shows four: ours, a receptionist's fully loaded cost, an answering service's per-call rate, and a do-it-yourself AI app's sticker price. Then it shows what each of those numbers leaves out.

What we charge

Level 99 runs four tiers. Each is a flat monthly price plus a one-time setup fee that covers CRM configuration, script writing, and getting the system live.

• Apprentice: $349 a month plus $297 setup. Text and web-form leads only, no phone agent.
• Operator: $699 a month plus $797 setup. Adds a phone agent, appointment booking, automated follow-up, and no-show recovery.
• Elite: $1,199 a month plus $1,497 setup. Adds a third agent and outbound calling, covering inbound and outbound.
• Prestige: custom. Multi-brand or multi-market builds with a dedicated architect.

Full details, including what's in each tier, are on the pricing page. Everything below runs the honest total cost of these tiers against the honest total cost of the alternatives. None of it compares sticker prices.

What a sticker price usually leaves out

A monthly number on a landing page is rarely the whole bill. Four costs are worth checking before comparing any two options.

Telephony and overage. Smith.ai's published plan covers 30 calls for $300 a month; go over, and the per-call rate kicks in on top of the base price. We flagged this gap when we ran the break-even math in September. Ask any vendor what happens above their plan's limit, ours included, before you sign anything.

Platform markup. Some AI answering tools are a layer on top of a telephony or CRM platform they don't own, and the markup on that underlying platform rides along inside the price without being named as a line item.

Setup labor. Someone has to write the scripts, load your services and prices, and connect the calendar. If that work isn't in the quote you got, it's an invoice you haven't seen yet, or it's a weekend you're giving up instead.

A2P text registration. Any system that follows up by text has to register under the carriers' A2P 10DLC rules, or carriers block the messages outright. Twilio, the gateway most of these systems run on, publishes a $4.50 one-time brand registration fee, a $41.50 standard vetting fee, and an $11 appeal fee if a brand gets rejected. We registered our own business texting and paid every one of those line items ourselves. Most pricing pages never mention it. We fold it into setup.

The honest math on hiring a receptionist

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts a receptionist's median wage at $18.27 an hour, $38,010 a year, as of May 2025. Benefits run 29.7% of total compensation per BLS's March 2025 compensation data, which puts the fully loaded cost near $54,068 a year, about $4,506 a month, for one person on one shift. The full derivation is here. Nights and weekends aren't in that number. Neither is what happens on a lunch break, or when two lines ring at once.

The honest math on an answering service

Live answering services bill $0.65 to $2.50 a minute, which runs roughly $1.95 to $7.50 for a 3-minute triage call. There's no fixed cost and no ceiling. A slow month is nearly free. A busy one costs proportionally more, and the per-call rate never drops as volume grows. The full crossover math against hiring is here. An answering service beats a salary below roughly 20 to 76 calls a day, and loses above it.

The honest math on a DIY AI app

Self-serve AI answering apps list for under $50 to a few hundred dollars a month, and for a one-truck operation with time on evenings, that price can be the right call. The number only covers the call itself. Say your time is worth $75 an hour. Five hours a month spent writing scripts and chasing the leads the app never followed up on turns a $50 app into a $425 month. That math still skips what a missed follow-up cost you in lost work, which nobody puts on an invoice.

The arithmetic on payback, not a stat

No independent research tells you how fast any of this pays for itself, so here's the arithmetic instead of a borrowed number. Say your average job is worth $400.

On Apprentice, $349 a month is under one job; the $297 setup is under one job, once. On Operator, $699 a month is under two jobs; the $797 setup is exactly two jobs, once. On Elite, $1,199 a month is exactly three jobs; the $1,497 setup is under four jobs, once.

Run the same math against a receptionist's $4,506 a month: that's more than eleven jobs before the hire has covered their own fully loaded cost, every month, before they've produced a cent of net revenue. Whether any of this pencils out for your shop depends on how many calls you're missing today. Pull that number from your own phone line. Nobody's pricing page can give it to you, ours included.

What the rest of this series already showed

Eight weeks of this series, in one place:

• The 90-second speed-to-lead playbook for solar: a lead left waiting cools off within minutes.
• The 1-in-4 calls you never hear: a quarter of home-services calls go unanswered, and almost nobody leaves a voicemail instead.
• One in three voicemails was a booked job: what happened at FrontPorch once an AI coordinator answered those calls instead of a voicemail box.
• AI vs. answering service vs. hiring: the break-even math this post builds on.
• The sixth call wins the job: half of leads get one follow-up call, but the ones that convert often needed six.
• The 73-file problem: the AI agent North Energy built for its own staff, separate from the one answering its calls.
• When you shouldn't buy an AI receptionist: sometimes the honest answer is "wait" or "hire a person."
• Your team reports numbers nobody checks: a scoreboard caught three copied months and a broken formula on its first run.

Every post in that list points at the same decision. Pick the tier that matches the failure mode you actually have. The smallest number on a page is rarely the right answer. See every tier and book a Fit Call.