UK call answering services, and the prices they actually publish.

Four of the ten providers below publish no price at all, and two of the four are among the best-known names in the UK market. Every figure on this page was read from the provider’s own pricing page on 29 August 2026, and where a provider publishes nothing the row says so rather than repeating a number from somewhere else.

We build AI receptionists, so this is an interested party comparing its competitors. There are two ways that becomes useful rather than worthless: state where every figure came from so it can be checked, and be specific about which businesses should buy something other than us. Both are below, and the second one is arithmetic rather than modesty — there is a table showing exactly where we are the more expensive choice.

Prices are given twice, because an entry price on its own is close to meaningless in this market. Once as published, and once costed at five monthly call volumes, which is where the providers separate.

The comparison

Prices as published on 29 August 2026. Entry price means the cheapest plan on the provider’s own page, not the cheapest thing a salesperson might agree to.

Provider	Answered by	Based	Entry price as published
Face For Business	People	UK	From £49/month, no setup fee
AnswerConnect UK	People	UK	£205/month for 150 minutes, plus £49.99 setup
alldayPA	People	UK	Not published — quote only
Moneypenny	People	UK	Not published — quote only
JAM	People	UK	Not published — quote only
Ruby	People	US	$250/month for 50 minutes
Smith.ai	AI with live agents	US	$300/month for 30 calls
PATLive	People	US	$49/month pay-as-you-go, or $99 for 50 minutes
Nexa	People	US	Not published — quote only
Megabite	AI, escalating to your people	UK and Spain	£1,500 setup, then £195/month including 60 minutes, £0.50 per minute after

Verbatim was on the list and its site did not resolve on the day of checking, so it is not included rather than being described from memory. Prices exclude VAT or sales tax unless the provider states otherwise.

What the prices do when you use them

An entry price is close to useless on its own, because these providers meter completely different things. This is the same set again, on the basis that actually generates the invoice.

Provider	What is metered	Beyond the bundle
Face For Business	Time, charged by the second	Plans from £49 (taster), £99 (message only), £115 (inclusive minutes)
AnswerConnect UK	Time, rounded up to a whole minute	£1.75 per additional minute on every published tier
Ruby	Time, in monthly bundles	$250/50 min, $395/100, $720/200, $1,725/500
Smith.ai	Calls, regardless of length	$11.50 per call over 30, falling to $8.50 on the 300-call plan
PATLive	Time, in monthly bundles	$2.99 per extra minute at the bottom, $1.49 at the top
Megabite	Build once, then monthly plus connected minutes	Monthly is largely fixed; usage scales with call volume

What it costs at a realistic volume

An entry price is the wrong clock, and every comparison in this market publishes only that one. It rewards whoever sets the lowest first tier and tells you nothing about the bill you will actually receive, because these providers charge completely different amounts for the minutes past the bundle — from £0.50 to £2.29.

So here is the same set costed at five monthly volumes. US prices converted at 0.7379, the rate on 29 August 2026; that rate moves and the sterling figures move with it. Per-call pricing is converted at 2.5 minutes per call, which is PATLive’s own published estimate rather than one we invented.

Minutes a month	Megabite	AnswerConnect	PATLive	Smith.ai	Ruby
100 (about 40 calls)	£215	£205	£139	£306	£291
200 (about 80 calls)	£265	£245	£258	£598	£531
300 (about 120 calls)	£315	£332.50	£353	£830	£1,273
500 (about 200 calls)	£415	£657.50	£560	£1,450	£1,273
1,000 (about 400 calls)	£665	£1,532.50	£1,106	£2,177	Not published

Face For Business is absent from this table because it publishes plan prices but not a per-minute rate, so there is no honest way to cost it at volume. Ruby publishes no tier above 500 minutes. AnswerConnect publishes three tiers to 350 minutes; figures above that apply its published £1.75 per additional minute. Megabite’s row excludes the £1,500 setup, which is treated separately below. Sterling figures converted from dollars are rounded to the nearest pound; the sterling-priced rows are exact.

Where we are the wrong choice, in numbers

Below roughly 285 minutes a month, somebody else is cheaper, and it is not close at the bottom. At 100 minutes PATLive costs £139 against our £215, and Face For Business starts at £49. If your call volume is genuinely low and expected to stay low, buy one of those and stop reading.

The setup fee moves that line further. £1,500 spread over two years adds £62.50 a month, which pushes the point where we become cheaper than AnswerConnect out to about 356 minutes; over the first year alone it is nearer 406. On any honest reading, we are the expensive option for a business taking a couple of calls a day.

Above that line the position reverses sharply, and the reason is the marginal rate rather than the monthly fee. Minutes past the bundle cost £0.50 with us, against £1.75 at AnswerConnect and £1.79 to £2.29 at PATLive — three to four times the difference. That is why the gap does not merely close at 300 minutes but inverts: at 1,000 minutes a month the same service is £665 here and £1,532.50 at AnswerConnect.

Put plainly, every per-minute and per-call model in this table charges you more for growing. A build costs more to start and then stops scaling with the phone. Which of those suits you is a question about your call volume next year, not this month — and it is the whole argument, so it is worth doing the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than taking ours.

Our 60 included minutes is about 24 calls at the same 2.5-minute estimate, so most businesses buying this will pay more than £195. We would rather say that here than have you discover it on the first invoice.

Three things worth more than the headline price

Rounding is the detail nobody advertises and it moves real money. Face For Business charges by the second. AnswerConnect rounds every interaction up to a whole minute, though it does not charge for the first thirty interactions under thirty seconds in a billing cycle. For a business whose calls average around ninety seconds, that difference outweighs most of the gaps in the headline prices.

An advertised price and a published plan can disagree on the same site. AnswerConnect’s homepage banner offers a start “for only £45/month”. The plan table further down the same page begins at £205 for 150 minutes. We could not reconcile the two from the page itself, so the table above uses the plan.

The dollar prices are a moving target. Ruby, Smith.ai and PATLive all publish in US dollars. For a service you intend to keep for years, that is an ongoing exposure to the exchange rate rather than a one-off conversion, and it is invisible in every comparison that lists the numbers side by side without saying so.

What none of them publish

Not one of the ten pricing pages states where call recordings and transcripts are stored and processed. Several say where the receptionists sit — AnswerConnect and Face For Business both say UK, PATLive says US — but the answering location and the data location are different questions, and only one of them appears anywhere on these pages.

For most businesses that is a detail. If you handle health, financial or children’s data it is a UK GDPR question you will eventually have to answer for yourself, and the time to get it in writing is before signing rather than during an audit. We are including ourselves in the criticism: it is not on our pricing either.

When you should buy one of them instead

Three situations, stated plainly, where a productised service beats anything we would build.

The honest summary is that a build earns its setup cost through what happens after the call — the booking in a live diary, the record written back, the qualification rules that are specific to you. If a message in your inbox is genuinely enough, the list above is cheaper and you should use it. We say the same thing at more length in what a virtual receptionist actually costs, and set the US providers against each other in Smith.ai alternatives.

How this was checked, and what went wrong

Every figure came from the provider’s own page, fetched on 29 August 2026. No figure was taken from another comparison, which matters more than it sounds: the search results for this topic are dominated by comparisons published by answering service companies, and their numbers frequently disagree with the providers’ own current pages.

Two limitations worth stating. Verbatim’s site did not resolve on the day, so it is absent rather than estimated. And a pricing page is a snapshot — these change without notice, which is exactly why every row here is dated and why the sources below link to the page rather than to our summary of it.

Found something out of date? The date on this page is the date it was true. Tell us and we will re-check the row.

Common questions

How much does a UK telephone answering service cost?

Of the providers checked on 29 August 2026, the published UK entry points were £49 a month at Face For Business and £205 a month for 150 minutes at AnswerConnect, the latter plus a £49.99 setup fee and £1.75 for each additional minute. Moneypenny, alldayPA and JAM publish no rate card at all, so any figure quoted for them elsewhere did not come from their own site.

Which UK answering services publish their prices?

Face For Business and AnswerConnect publish plan tables. Moneypenny, alldayPA, JAM and the US provider Nexa route you to a quote instead. That is four of the ten providers checked, and it is the single most consistent finding of this comparison.

Why do comparisons of answering services disagree with each other?

Because most of them are published by answering service companies, and because prices are quoted without a source or a date. A figure copied from another comparison two years ago survives indefinitely. Every figure on this page names the page it came from and the day it was read, so it can be checked and it can be seen to have gone stale.

Which UK answering service is cheapest?

It depends entirely on volume, and any comparison answering it with one number is quoting an entry price. On the figures checked on 29 August 2026, PATLive was cheapest at around 100 minutes a month (£139) and AnswerConnect at 200 (£245). Above roughly 300 minutes Megabite becomes cheapest and the gap widens: at 1,000 minutes a month it is £665 against £1,106 for PATLive and £1,532.50 for AnswerConnect. The reason is the rate for minutes past the bundle, which runs from £0.50 to £2.29 depending on the provider.

Is per-minute or per-call billing cheaper?

It depends entirely on how long your calls run, which is why the comparison is hard. Per-minute suits short calls and punishes long ones; per-call is the reverse. The detail that decides it is usually rounding: Face For Business charges by the second, while AnswerConnect rounds every interaction up to a whole minute. On a business whose calls average ninety seconds, that difference is larger than most of the headline price gaps.

Do UK businesses need a UK-based answering service?

Not necessarily, but three things are worth confirming before buying from a US provider: the billing currency, since Ruby, Smith.ai and PATLive all publish in dollars and your cost then moves with the exchange rate; whether the hours of cover span your working day rather than a US one; and where call recordings and transcripts are stored and processed.

Where is call data processed and stored?

None of the ten pricing pages checked says. Several state where the receptionists sit — AnswerConnect and Face For Business both say UK — but that is where the call is answered, not where the recording and transcript end up. If you handle health, financial or children's data, ask for it in writing rather than inferring it from the answering location.