Smith.ai gives you 25 calls free. Call 26 costs $3.00, more than their paid tiers.

Smith.ai is an American hybrid: an AI receptionist with live human agents available as a per-call add-on, and a separate human-staffed answering service alongside it. They run the only free-forever tier in this comparison, which is a genuinely strong offer and one we cannot match. What the free tier does not advertise is the shape of the curve just past it.

Start free pilotFree pilot. About 14 days to a working line, no call limit.

Who is Smith.ai actually for, and who are we for?

Smith.ai is for a business that wants to start at zero and keep a human escape hatch. We are for a business whose calls need building for, where the escape hatch matters less than the agent being right in the first place.

Smith.ai

A small American professional services firm, most often legal, that wants to try AI answering with no commitment and keep the option of a real person on the line. The free tier means the decision costs nothing to make, the AI and human ladders sit side by side so you can move between them, and they are a known brand in the space with a decade of category presence. For a low-volume firm, 25 free calls a month may genuinely be the whole requirement.

AnswerAI

A business past the point where a generic agent is adequate, where the phone has to know your treatments, your intake rules, and the specific questions it must refuse to answer. We build against your own call log over about two weeks, with your own dashboard over it and no per-call meter behind it, so booking a caller in costs the same as telling them your hours. Starting at nothing is the one thing we cannot match: for a business making a handful of simple calls a month, their free tier is the right answer.

Smith.ai figures read from smith.ai/pricing and smith.ai/ai-receptionist on August 9, 2026. They publish two separate ladders; both are shown, and both render in full in the pricing section below.

	Smith.ai	AnswerAI
What you get	Two shared products: an AI tier and a human tier	Custom software written for one business, against your own call log.
What the AI monthly covers	$0 covers 25 calls a month, free forever	Every call, every month; the fee is agreed in writing before anything is built.
When you go over (AI)	$3.00 per call after the free 25	None. There is no meter to go over.
What the human monthly covers	$300 covers 30 calls, answered by people	Every call, answered by software written for your business
When you go over (human)	$11.50 / $10.50 / $8.50 per call by tier	None. There is no meter to go over.
Booking an appointment	$1.50 per call, as an add-on	Included in the build
Second language	Dedicated Spanish line, $1.00 per call	More than seventy languages on the platform. English and French is a starting point, not a premium tier, and there is no per-language charge.
Currency	US dollars	Canadian dollars

The add-on rows are the ones that move a real invoice. Booking an appointment is the thing most people are buying a receptionist for, and on Smith.ai it is priced per call on top of the plan.

When does Smith.ai's free tier stop being the cheapest option?

At 76 calls a month. Below that, free plus overage beats their own Pro plan; above it, Pro is cheaper. It is a real crossover and neither their pricing page nor ours would normally show it to you.

A model: Smith.ai's published AI rates, our stated volumes

Smith.ai's own published AI tiers (verified August 9, 2026): Free at $0 for 25 calls then $3.00 a call; Pro at $150 for roughly 2–3 calls a day at a stated $2.00 base rate; Enterprise at $500 for roughly 10 calls a day at a stated $1.67. Booking is a $1.50-per-call add-on and is excluded here; add it back if you want appointments booked, which most people do.

At 25 calls: Free tier, fully used$0The strongest offer in the category, and there is no way to argue with free.
At 50 calls: Free tier plus overage$7525 free, then 25 × $3.00 = $75. Still cheaper than the $150 Pro plan.
At 76 calls: the crossover$15325 free, then 51 × $3.00 = $153. Pro is $150. This is where the free tier stops winning.
At 150 calls: Free tier plus overage$37525 free, then 125 × $3.00 = $375, against $150 on Pro. Staying on free now costs $225 a month more than moving.
Add appointment booking at 150 calls+$225150 × $1.50. The add-on is priced per call, so it scales with everything else.

The call count where free stops being the cheapest way to use Smith.ai76 calls

This is not a trap and we are not implying one: the free tier is real, it is generous, and the paid plans are there precisely for when you outgrow it. What the model shows is that the free tier's overage rate is higher than every paid rate they publish, so the plan that costs nothing is the most expensive one to overuse. Worth a calendar reminder at around 70 calls a month.

Every rate above is Smith.ai’s own published figure, read from their pricing page on August 9, 2026. Prices in this category move; check before you decide anything on them.

Where is Smith.ai genuinely better than us?

Three things, and they are all real: a free-forever tier, live humans available on the same account, and a brand people have already heard of. We have no answer to the first and only a partial one to the second.

The free tier is the strongest single offer in this category. Twenty-five calls a month, forever, at no cost, is a better starting point than anything we can construct; our pilot is free but it is fourteen days of building and it ends in a conversation about price. For a solo practitioner taking a few calls a week, Smith.ai may cost nothing indefinitely, and no argument we could make changes that arithmetic.

The human fallback is a genuine architectural advantage. Live agent involvement is available as a per-call add-on on any plan, which means the same account can escalate from AI to a person without changing vendors. Our escalation goes to your staff, which is the right design for a business that has staff and a worse one for a solo firm that does not.

And they are an established name in American professional services. A firm that has heard of Smith.ai will approve the invoice without a discussion. On brand recognition in the US market there is no argument for us to make, and their design and content operation is the best in the category; we said so in our own competitive scan before we had any reason to be generous about it.

Where are we better than Smith.ai?

The agent is built for one business rather than configured from a template, add-ons are not priced per call, and we are Canadian: billing in CAD, and familiar with PIPEDA, PHIPA and Alberta's Health Information Act rather than HIPAA alone.

The add-on model is the practical difference on an invoice. Booking an appointment is a $1.50-per-call add-on at Smith.ai, and appointment booking is the thing most businesses are buying a receptionist to do. At 200 calls a month that is $300 on top of the plan, for the core function. In a build, booking is not a line item; it is the job.

The build difference shows on calls with rules. A dental practice in Alberta is governed by the Health Information Act; a clinic's phone has obligations that a template does not know about. Our industry pages carry those specifics because we researched them per vertical, and the agent is built to the same specifics. A configured product applies a general policy and hopes the general policy fits.

The Canadian difference is smaller than the two Alberta competitors can claim (our data is stored in the United States and we say so everywhere it is relevant), but it is not nothing. We bill in Canadian dollars, so your cost does not move with the exchange rate, and the compliance conversation starts from Canadian law rather than being translated into it.

How does the pricing model differ?

Smith.ai bills per call, with core functions priced as per-call add-ons on top. We quote per build, and the functions are the build rather than extras attached to it.

AI - Free$025 calls / month$3.00 / call after 25
AI - Pro$150Roughly 2–3 calls a day at $2.00/call
AI - Enterprise$500Roughly 10 calls a day at $1.67/call
Human - Starter$30030 calls$11.50 / call
Human - Basic$81090 calls$10.50 / call
Human - Pro$2,100300 calls$8.50 / call

Booking $1.50/call · dedicated Spanish line $1.00/call · extra transfer destination $15/mo · outbound caller ID $10/mo Read from Smith.ai’s own pricing page on August 9, 2026.

Per-call is the easiest model in this category to understand and the easiest to underestimate, because the headline rate is rarely the rate you pay. Booking is $1.50 a call, a dedicated Spanish line is $1.00 a call, extra transfer destinations are $15 a month each and outbound caller ID is $10 a month. None of those are unreasonable individually; together they are the difference between the advertised number and the invoice.

Their human ladder is a different product again: $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90, $2,100 for 300, with overage from $8.50 to $11.50 a call. That is priced as human labour and it is not competing with us; it is competing with Ruby, and we compare against that model separately on our answering service page.

A free tier whose overage rate is higher than every paid plan is not a trick, but it does mean the cheapest plan on the page is the most expensive one to outgrow quietly.
Nick Lovett, Founder, AnswerAI

If you are under about seventy calls a month, take the free tier, genuinely. Come back when the phone is busy enough that being right on every call is worth building for.

Start free pilot

So who should pick which?

Pick on volume and on whether you need a human in the loop. Low volume or a need for live agents points at Smith.ai; Canadian compliance and judgment-heavy calls point at a build.

Pick Smith.ai if

You take fewer than about 70 calls a month; the free tier may cover you entirely
You want live human agents available on the same account
You are a US business and billing in USD is simpler
You want to start today at no cost and decide later
You need a dedicated Spanish line as a standard option
Brand recognition matters to whoever approves the invoice

Pick AnswerAI if

Appointment booking is the main job, and you do not want it priced per call
You are Canadian and want CAD billing and Canadian privacy law as the starting point
Your calls carry clinical, legal or safety judgments that must not be guessed
Volume is high enough that per-call add-ons compound
You want an agent built against your own call log, not a configured template
You would rather escalate to your own staff than to a stranger

Questions about Smith.ai vs AnswerAI

Yes, for the first 25 calls a month, on a plan they describe as free forever, verified August 9, 2026. It is the only free-forever tier in this comparison and it is a genuinely strong offer. Calls past 25 are $3.00 each, which is higher than the effective rate on either of their paid plans, so the free tier becomes the more expensive option somewhere around 76 calls a month.

On the AI ladder: $0 for the first 25 calls, then $3.00 each; Pro is $150 a month at a stated $2.00 base rate, and Enterprise is $500 at a stated $1.67. Their human answering service is separate and much higher: $300 for 30 calls up to $2,100 for 300, with overage from $8.50 to $11.50 a call. Appointment booking is a $1.50-per-call add-on on top. All verified August 9, 2026.

No, and that is a real gap against Smith.ai. What we offer instead is a free pilot: about fourteen days to a working agent built for your business, with no call limit during the pilot, and you keep it or walk away. It is a bigger commitment of our time and a bigger ask of yours. For a business taking a handful of calls a month, Smith.ai's free tier is the better answer and we would tell you so.

Yes, live agent involvement is available as a per-call add-on on any plan, which is a genuine advantage of their hybrid model and something we do not offer. Our agent escalates to your own staff according to rules set during the build. That is the better design if you have staff to escalate to and the worse one if you do not.

Take the free tier first

We mean it. If your phone is quiet, Smith.ai costs nothing and we cost something. When the volume rises far enough that being right on every call matters more than being cheap on most of them, our pilot is free: about fourteen days to a working line, no call limit.