How Much Does an AI Receptionist Cost

An AI receptionist on volai does not come as a flat monthly plan - you pay for exactly what the phone line uses. The price has three parts: a monthly fee for the phone number, a per-minute rate for every incoming minute, and a per-minute surcharge for the voice agent itself, both billed by the second and excluding VAT. A business with ordinary traffic - ten to thirty calls a day, averaging around two minutes - lands between 1,825 CZK and 5,425 CZK a month. The exact breakdown is in the table below.

What does an AI receptionist cost, line by line?

Three line items, none of them hidden inside a bundle:

• Phone number - 25 CZK (~EUR 1.04) per month, no matter how many calls land on it.
• Incoming call - 0.50 CZK/min, billed by the second rather than rounded up to the minute.
• Voice agent - 2.50 CZK/min on top of the call price. This is the AI receptionist itself - without it, the number just rings.

Add it up and a minute answered by the AI receptionist costs 3 CZK (~EUR 0.13). Nothing else is billed - no setup fee, no fixed-term contract, no per-seat charge. The signup credit, credited after e-mail verification, does not expire either, so a business can test the whole thing without losing it just because the first month ran short.

Three scenarios by call volume

The exact number depends on how many calls the receptionist picks up per day and how long they run on average. The table below assumes two minutes per call over a 30-day month - shorter calls (a quick question about opening hours or an address) cost proportionally less, because billing runs by the second.

The phone number (25 CZK) is the only fixed line item in the budget - the table shows how quickly it fades next to the cost of calls as volume grows. At 100 calls a day it is well under one percent of the total.

Spelled out for one row: an online shop that gets 30 order-status calls a day, averaging 2 minutes each, runs up 1,800 call minutes a month. The call itself costs 900 CZK, the voice agent adds 4,500 CZK on top. Add the monthly number fee and the total is 5,425 CZK (~EUR 226.04) a month - exactly the middle row of the table above. If half the calls last only a minute (a quick status check), the bill drops proportionally, because it is billed by the second, not rounded up.

Why volai does not sell bundles of minutes

Most Czech AI receptionist vendors sell prepaid bundles: pay a fixed amount, get a monthly cap on calls. A bundle only pays off when the volume is estimated correctly. Undershoot it and a business pays for minutes it never used; overshoot it and there is a top-up or a service cutoff mid-month to deal with. volai bills actual usage instead - a quiet month costs less, a busy one costs more, and there is never a question of what happens when the bundle runs out over the holidays.

What else is included?

The price covers more than just an answered call. After every agent call, the business can pull up a transcript and a short summary for that call through the REST API, or receive them directly in the call.completed webhook - no need to listen to the whole recording to know what the caller wanted. The agent can also capture structured data from the call according to its own configuration - a name, an order number, how urgent the matter is - even when it cannot resolve the request itself, so a call still leaves a contact behind instead of just a record that the phone rang. The receptionist also speaks Czech by default plus English, Slovak, German and Polish, so a call from a foreign customer does not go unanswered purely for language reasons. None of this needs separate configuration or billing - it is part of the same per-minute price above.

What do other Czech AI receptionist providers charge?

For context, here is what competitors in the Czech market publish on their own pricing pages (checked 2026-09-02). Prices are listed exactly as published - whether they include VAT was not verified, and volai's own rates above exclude it:

• it-solution.cz/ai-recepcni - bundles at 1,990, 2,990 or from 4,490 CZK per month.
• KraftunAI (kraftunai.com) - from 1,000 CZK for 250 minutes, roughly 4 CZK per minute inside the bundle.
• switchly.ai - 1,900 CZK for 100 calls per month.
• csbot.cz - the price is right in the headline, from 1.90 CZK per minute.

None of them combine a per-minute price, a phone number, a public REST API and a plain description of what the receptionist can do on one page without a sales form first - with volai the whole breakdown is right here, and the current rate is always on the pricing page.

In fairness: a cheaper per-minute rate does exist on the market - csbot.cz advertises from 1.90 CZK per minute. On volai a minute with the agent costs 3 CZK; in exchange it comes with a phone number with no bundle, per-second billing, and the same public REST API that can drive a call from your own application.

What is not included

The breakdown above covers incoming calls the receptionist handles itself. Outside of it: outbound SMS, outbound calls a business triggers itself (an order follow-up call, for example), and transfers to a human - those are billed as a regular outbound call at the same rate, with no extra agent surcharge, because the agent is no longer on the line by then. The full rate card is on the pricing page.

How to work out the price for your own business

The most accurate way is to run the numbers on real traffic: how many calls the phone line answers today, or would answer if it did not just ring out. If that number is not known, a week of the carrier bill divided by the days the business was open gets close enough. A calculator with industry breakdowns - dental clinics, auto repair, restaurants, e-commerce, real estate agencies and trades - lives on the AI receptionist page, together with a demo number to call directly.

Every amount on this page is computed straight from volai's live rate card, not typed once and left to go stale - if the rates ever change, so does this article. The current numbers always live on the pricing page.

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