What an AI receptionist costs in Canada, next to a human one

A full-time receptionist in Canada costs at least $47,067 a year: the national median wage of $21.00 an hour plus the employer's share of CPP and EI, before vacation pay, benefits and workers' compensation. The AI plans on the two AI price pages we read start at $29 a month.

Those two numbers are not the same service, and treating them as if they were is how owners end up buying the wrong thing. This post sets the real prices side by side, shows the arithmetic, and says what each number leaves out.

What a human receptionist actually costs

Job Bank lists the national median wage for receptionists at $21.00 an hour, with a low of $16.25 and a high of $29.00 (reference period 2023-2024, page updated November 19, 2025). We took the median and assumed 40 hours a week for 52 weeks.

The same arithmetic as a table, so you can swap in your own wage:

It also buys 40 of the 168 hours in a week, or 23.8% of the clock. The other 128 hours are voicemail unless someone else covers them.

What the public price pages say

We read four pricing pages directly on October 14, 2026. Two sell AI answering. Two sell people.

Three cautions. None of the four pages names a currency code; they show a dollar sign. We treated the prices as US dollars and converted at the Bank of Canada rate of 1.4263 on October 14, 2026, so if a vendor bills in Canadian dollars our converted figures overstate the cost. Sales tax and card exchange fees are left out, and the pages do not say whether Canadian tax applies. Dialzara's page says its plans include a US-based phone number, with UK, AU, NZ and international numbers on request, so ask whether you can get a Canadian one. Tables use monthly prices; Smith.ai also lists a 10% discount for 12 months. Smith.ai's page shows plan prices under a description of "professional call answering by real people" and also offers an "AI-first" choice whose prices we could not read, so we list it as people-staffed. And the plans do not count the same thing: Dialzara and Ruby bill minutes, Goodcall bills unique customers (one phone number, once a month), and Smith.ai bills calls.

Put them on one footing: 100 calls a month

To compare, we assumed 100 calls a month averaging 2 minutes, which is 200 minutes. That is our assumption, not a market figure, so replace it with your own phone log before you trust the result. The pages do not say how they round minutes on each call, so 2 minutes may understate the cost.

On these assumptions the AI plans cost about 3% to 4% of the in-house figure and 11% to 13% of Ruby's. That compares prices only. Dialzara's cheapest plan at this volume (Lite) has no warm transfer, calendar sync or after-hours rules, which its $99 Pro plan includes, and no price page can say how well an AI plan answers a call.

What happens when your volume changes

The four vendors price very differently once call volume moves. We used 30, 100 and 300 calls a month, each averaging 2 minutes (60, 200 and 600 minutes), and picked the cheapest listed option for each vendor. Figures are in the dollars shown on the pages; multiply by 1.4263 for Canadian dollars.

Three things stand out. A per-customer plan barely moves between 30 and 100 calls, then steps up. A per-minute plan tracks your call length. And Smith.ai's listed price goes from $300 at 30 calls to $2,100 at 300.

What the price does not tell you

• Quality. We have not tested these products and are not ranking them.
• Everything around the plan. Setup time, connecting your calendar, a phone number, and the hours you spend checking the transcripts.
• Your volume and call length. Your phone log, not ours, decides which billing style is cheap.
• Canadian details. Ask which phone numbers you can get, where recordings are stored, and how call-recording consent and French-language callers are handled.

A five-step cost check you can run this week

1. Pull your phone log for four weeks and count the calls you answered, the calls you missed, and the ones that came after hours.
2. Time ten real calls and use the average, not our 2 minutes.
3. Write down what you need the call to do: take a message, book, quote, or route an emergency.
4. Price two plans from each billing style (minutes, customers, calls) using your own numbers, and add what the plan leaves out.
5. Run the cheapest plan that covers step 3 on a trial for a month, and compare what it missed to what you were missing before.

If step 4 leaves you comparing a $79 plan with a $3,922 monthly salary cost, the useful question is not which is cheaper. It is which hours and which calls you want a person for.

Every number, and where it came from

Each figure above comes from one of these public pages. We re-opened every page after writing and confirmed that the quoted wording is there. The CRA pages block automated checks, so we read them in a browser tool and cross-checked the figures against CFIB.