What an AI receptionist does, and what it costs in Canada

What an AI receptionist is

Picture a phone line with a voice behind it that has read a short sheet about your business: your hours, the area you cover, what you do and what you turn down, and the questions people ask you every week. When a call comes in and nobody picks up, or at any hour you choose, it answers. The caller talks the way they would to a person. It listens, replies, and writes down what matters.

Voicemail waits for a message that most callers never leave. A phone tree (“press 1 for bookings”) makes the caller do the sorting. An AI receptionist holds the conversation and does the sorting itself, then hands you the result.

An AI receptionist or a staffed answering service?

An AI receptionist and an answering service meet the same need. With a staffed answering service, a person at a call centre picks up in your business name, reads from notes you gave them, and passes the message on. An AI receptionist does that job with software in place of the person.

What changes is mostly what happens around the call. Software picks up on the first ring at any hour, and it can send the caller a text straight after. A person can read a caller’s tone better and copes with the strange call nobody wrote notes for. If most of your calls are people asking when you can come and what it costs, the software usually does the job. If they are upset people who need someone to listen, pay for a person.

We set the two side by side in AI receptionist vs answering service.

A real call: 9:40pm, under a sink

A plumber is on his back under a kitchen sink at 9:40pm, finishing a job that ran late. His phone buzzes in his pocket. He cannot answer it, and by the time his hands are dry the caller may well have rung the next plumber on the list.

With an AI receptionist on the line, it goes differently. It picks up on the business name. The caller says water is coming through the ceiling below an upstairs bathroom. If the plumber put it on the sheet, the receptionist tells them where a main shut-off valve usually is. It takes a name, a mobile number and the address, and asks whether the water is still coming. Then it tells the caller what happens next, in whatever words the plumber gave it: he rings back tonight, or first thing, or the first slot tomorrow is theirs.

When the plumber gets back to the van, there is a text waiting with the name, the number, the address and the problem in one line. He calls back already knowing the job. The caller, meanwhile, was told what happens next, which a voicemail greeting cannot do.

The website matters in that same moment too, because a worried caller often reads it on a phone before ringing. Our notes on designing for the 2am call walk through a page built for exactly that reader.

What a trade should expect from one

Before it answers a single call, somebody has to write the sheet it reads from. For a plumber, an electrician or a roofer that means the area you cover and the towns you will not drive to, the work you turn down, any prices you are happy to give over the phone, and what a caller should be told about when you will ring back. The better that sheet, the better the calls. Expect to spend some time on it with whoever sets it up.

After that, expect a text after every call it takes, and expect to read every one of them closely for the first week. That is where you find the question it answered badly or the town it should have turned down, and each one is a line added to the sheet.

Expect it to save you the call you would have lost while your hands were full. Do not expect it to sell the job for you. It takes the details and tells the caller what happens next. The callback, the visit and the price are still yours.

If your worry is that callers will hang up on a machine, that question has its own guide: is an AI receptionist worth it.

What it cannot do

It cannot see the job. It can take a description and ask the questions you gave it, and it will not tell a slow drip from a burst pipe the way you can standing in the room.

It should not quote a price it has not been given. A sensible setup gives it your fixed prices and nothing else, and tells it to say you will confirm everything beyond them.

It gets things wrong sometimes. A noisy line or an unusual name can come through misspelled in the text. Ring it yourself before you pay, and keep reading the messages.

Some callers want a person, and it is not one. A good setup offers to take their details or book a time with you, and never pretends otherwise.

What AI receptionists cost in Canada

Sellers in Canada publish their own guides to pricing, and two of them give ranges. One Canadian guide written in 2026 puts plans at about $30 to $400 a month. Another puts Canadian AI receptionists at C$99 to C$299 a month. Those are what sellers say about the market. We have not measured it, and prices like these change often.

The ranges are wide because the plans are put together differently. Most offers fit one of these shapes.

By the minute

You pay for the time it spends on the phone, sometimes with a small monthly base. That is cheap for a quiet line and hard to budget for a busy one, because a heavy week of calls becomes a heavy bill.

A monthly plan with minutes in it

A fixed fee covers a set number of minutes or calls, and anything past that is charged by the minute. This is the easiest to plan around. Compare the minutes included and the rate after them, not the headline fee.

A setup fee on top

Either kind can come with a one-time charge for writing the script and connecting it to your number and calendar. That is real work. It is also money paid before you know whether the thing suits your business, so get the figure in writing first.

A monthly figure on its own tells you little. Most of those plans are the phone answering and nothing else, so compare what each one includes before you compare prices.

Questions to ask any seller

• Where are call recordings and transcripts stored, for how long, and who can listen to them? One of those Canadian cost guides calls this the detail that decides.
• What does the line say at the start of a call about recording? The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says a business recording customer calls must tell the caller, say what the recording is for and ask for consent.
• Is a 20-second call billed as a full minute?
• Are the texts it sends included, or charged separately?
• Can it put an urgent caller through to your mobile, and at what hours?
• Is there a contract term, and what does leaving cost? What happens to your phone number if you go?

Then ring the seller’s own line before you pay, and put a couple of those questions to the receptionist itself.

How Droom does it, and what $449 a month covers

Droom sells one plan for this, and the price is public: $449 a month with no setup fee of any amount. The four days of setup are inside the monthly price, and it runs month to month.

That is above the top of both ranges quoted above, and it buys more than the phone. This is what it covers:

• The phone answered at every hour, with 300 answered minutes a month included (roughly a hundred calls) and 50 cents a minute past that. Joe tells you before you get near the limit.
• Missed calls texted back. Seconds after a missed call, the caller gets a text asking what they need.
• The follow-up that fits your week, such as a nudge on a quote nobody answered or a reminder before an appointment.
• The Google review system. The morning after a job, every customer gets a text with your Google review link.
• A five-page website built by Droom, with the assistant on it. Five pages is the whole website: a shop, a spreadsheet you edit yourself or a link into software you already run is a separate build, quoted on top.

The website becomes yours free after twelve months paid. Leave earlier and you can take it for $1,000, or it comes down with the plan. Once it is yours, the hosting and security are yours to run.

Three things are not in the plan, and it is fairer to say so now. It does not chase unpaid invoices. It does not draft quotes from a voice note. It does not text old customers to win them back.

The full breakdown, with a calculator for what missed calls are costing you, is on the automation page. The website half is the same work as our website service. If a website is all you want, the one-time prices are on the pricing page, and the reasoning behind them is in what a website costs in Vancouver.

Ring ours before you decide

Droom’s own line, 778-504-7535, is answered by an AI receptionist called Donna at every hour. Call it at lunch or at 9:40pm. Ask what the plan costs, ask something awkward, and listen to how she copes. Five minutes on that call will tell you more than this page can.

If you would rather speak to Joe, say so. She will take your details or book you a time.

Who it does not suit

If your phone rings twice a week, you do not need this. Voicemail and a quick call back will do, and $449 a month would buy you very little. The same goes for a business whose callers expect a person on every call. If people choose you because a human picks up, keep it that way, or pay for a staffed answering service.

It fits a business that misses calls because the people who could answer are busy doing the work: a trade on a job, a clinic mid-appointment, a salon with a client in the chair, a kitchen during service. At a clinic or a law office the caller is often nervous rather than rushed, and wants to know what happens next. That is the idea behind our family law build notes, and it applies to the phone as much as the page.