AI receptionist UKcompared on real prices
Most comparisons of AI receptionists never show you a price. This one is built around them. Below is every UK provider we could verify, with what they charge, what you actually get for it, and the per-minute cost once you divide one by the other. Where a provider does not publish something, we say so rather than guess.
All company and product names are the trademarks of their respective owners. Unity Bridge Solutions and Bridge Voice are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any provider listed on this page.
Not a marketing table. This is the actual billing screen inside Bridge Voice, with every pack price and per-minute rate on it.
What £30 a month actually buys
Two of the providers we verified publish a plan at this price, which makes it the one genuinely like-for-like comparison available. Same money, same month, very different allowances.
- Bridge Voice12p/min250 minutes
- The VoIP Shop20p/min150 minutes
At the same monthly price, Bridge Voice gives you 250 minutes at 12p/min. One caveat worth knowing up front: Starter is voice only and does not include SMS, while Cyberstaff's cheapest tier includes email and SMS notifications for £45. If you need text confirmations, compare against Bridge Voice Lite instead.
Every provider, every published number
Sorted by entry price. The effective rate is simply the monthly price divided by the included minutes, which is the only fair way to compare plans that bundle different allowances.
| Provider | Entry price | Included | Effective rate | Overage | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bridge VoiceUK · AI · unitybridgesolutions.com | £30/mo | 250 minutes | 12p/min | 35p/min, or packs from 12p/min | 14 days, 100 free minutes |
| Cyberstaff1UK (London) · AI · cyberstaff.com | £45/mo +VAT | 150 minutes | 30p/min | 30p/min | None advertised |
| The VoIP Shop2UK · AI · thevoipshop.co.uk | £30/mo | 150 minutes | 20p/min | 65p/min | None advertised |
| AIAnswerPhone3UK · AI · aianswerphone.co.uk | £47/mo | 350 minutes | 13.4p/min | Not published | None advertised |
| Fonio.ai4Austria · AI · fonio.ai | €99/mo | 1,000 minutes | €0.10/min | €15 per 100 minutes | 30-day money-back guarantee |
| Electronic Receptionist5UK · AI · electronicreceptionist.co.uk | From £97/mo | Not published | Cannot be calculated | Not published | Advertised, terms not published |
| Moneypenny6UK · AI and human · moneypenny.com/uk | Quote-based | Not published | Cannot be calculated | Not published | Free trial after a quote |
- 1.Cyberstaff: Cyberstaff publishes three tiers in their help centre: £45 for 150 minutes, £75 for 300 and £120 for 600, with additional minutes at 30p, 25p and 20p respectively. They state all prices are plus VAT. Their pricing is not shown on the public site and appears in-product once you have an account, where the entry tier was listed at £30 for 100 minutes on 4 August 2026.
- 2.The VoIP Shop: Their AI receptionist page carries two pricing tables that do not agree with each other: one prices the £30 tier at 150 minutes with 65p per extra minute, the other at 50 calls with 85p per extra call. Figures here are taken from the first table.
- 3.AIAnswerPhone: Three tiers published: £47 for 350 minutes, £77 for 750 and £97 for 1,250. Transcripts are included on all tiers and SMS is pay as you go. No overage rate, calendar booking or multilingual capability is stated.
- 4.Fonio.ai: Priced in euros, not pounds. Their €99 Solo plan handles one call at a time; €299 Team handles three. Bridge Voice answers every call at once on every plan.
- 5.Electronic Receptionist: The site advertises "start from £97/month" and "no contracts", but does not publish tiers, allowances or usage charges. You are directed to book a demo for a figure.
- 6.Moneypenny: Details checked July 2026 rather than on the date above. Telephone answering is priced by individual quote. Moneypenny also sells a separate AI Receptionist product. We compare their bureau service in detail on our dedicated Moneypenny page.
Every competitor figure on this page was taken from that provider's own public website on 4 August 2026, except where a note below the table gives a different date. Providers change their pricing, so always confirm current terms with them directly before you buy.
Six things worth checking on any quote
These are the details that decide what you actually pay, and they are the ones most often left off a pricing page. Use them on us as well as on everyone else.
Minutes or calls?
Providers that sell "calls" or "credits" rather than minutes are hard to compare and easy to underestimate. A five minute call and a thirty second call cost the same allowance.
Bridge Voice sells minutes: 250 on Starter, 1,000 on Lite, 3,000 on Growth.
What happens past the allowance
The overage rate decides your bill in a busy month, and it is the number most often left off the pricing page. Some published rates run to 65p or 85p a minute.
35p a minute, published, with minute packs from 12p/min and a spend cap you set yourself.
One call at a time, or all of them
An AI that answers a single call at once will still put your second caller through to voicemail. Check the concurrency limit before you believe "never miss a call".
Every call is answered simultaneously on every plan. There is no concurrency tier.
Transcripts, or a two-line message
Some providers do not record or transcribe at all, and others charge per call for it. Without a transcript you cannot audit what your receptionist actually said.
Full transcript, AI summary and analytics on every call, included in the subscription.
Is the headline price the real price
Very few providers state whether the price on the page is what lands on the invoice. A plan quoted excluding VAT costs a fifth more than it looks, which is enough to reverse a comparison between two close providers. Cyberstaff, for one, states that all its prices are plus VAT. This matters most if you are not VAT registered yourself, since a registered business reclaims it and a smaller one simply absorbs it.
Unity Bridge Solutions is not currently VAT registered, so no VAT is added to these prices at checkout. The figure you see is the figure you pay.
How you leave
A "no contracts" headline is worth checking against the terms. Minimum terms, early termination fees and mandatory retention calls all turn up in the small print.
No contract, £0 setup, cancel from the dashboard. Your account stays live to the end of the period you paid for.
This is what “transcripts included” actually looks like
A comparison table can say a provider includes transcripts. It cannot show you what you get. Every Bridge Voice call arrives like this: the full conversation turn by turn with timestamps, an AI summary of what was agreed, the caller, the duration, and how the call ended.
It matters because this is the record you audit when a customer says they were told something different. A two-line message summary cannot settle that.
Taken from a Bridge Voice demo account. Caller details are fictional and use the reserved 07700 900xxx range.
Our whole price list, on the same page as everyone else's
It would be a strange comparison page that hid its own pricing. Here is every Bridge Voice charge, including the ones that only apply if you go over.
The published tariff
- Starter - 250 minutes a month
- £30/mo
- Lite - 1,000 minutes a month
- £99/mo
- Growth - 3,000 minutes a month
- £399/mo
- Flex - prepaid, pay as you go
- 35p/min
- Minute packs - 100 / 250 / 500 extra minutes
- £15 / £35 / £65
- Extra UK phone number
- £5/mo
- SMS beyond your included allowance
- 10p/text
- Multilingual add-on (Lite)
- £29/mo
- Setup fee
- £0
- Long-term contract
- None
No VAT is added at checkout, so these are the amounts you pay. Starter, Lite and Growth include a 14-day trial with 100 free minutes. Cancel any time, there is no contract to leave.
1,000 minutes for £99
Lite works out at 9.9p/min, the lowest effective rate across the Bridge Voice range, and it adds SMS confirmations on top of everything Starter does. For most businesses comparing plans on this page, it is the tier worth pricing against.
Where the others beat us
No product wins on every measure, and a comparison page that claims otherwise is not worth reading. Here is where a rival would genuinely serve you better.
- AIAnswerPhone
Their £97 tier gives 1,250 minutes, which works out cheaper per minute than Bridge Voice Lite at 9.9p/min. If raw minutes under £100 are all you need, and you can do without calendar booking or multiple languages, they are better value on that one measure.
- Fonio.ai
At higher volumes their headline price is lower: €299 for 3,000 minutes against £399 for 3,000 on Growth. Worth weighing against the one-call-at-a-time limit on their entry plan and the fact that they bill in euros.
- Cyberstaff
Lead quality scoring is included from their £75 tier upwards. Bridge Voice has no equivalent: you get the transcript and the summary, but nothing that ranks callers by how promising they look. If you are triaging a high volume of enquiries, that is real work we leave you to do.
- Cyberstaff
Their cheapest tier includes email and SMS notifications. Bridge Voice Starter is voice only, with no SMS at all, so you would need Lite for text confirmations.
- Moneypenny
If what you actually want is a trained human being picking up in the first ring, a bureau does that and AI does not. We think AI wins on cost, coverage and record keeping. It does not win on human judgement.
Comparing one provider in particular?
Each of these goes further than the table above: their full published tiers, a row-by-row comparison, and an honest note on where they beat us.
UK AI receptionist FAQs
Want the detail on one provider? Read our full Bridge Voice vs Moneypenny comparison, the broader AI vs human answering piece, or the AI receptionist overview.
Which UK AI receptionist gives you the most minutes for £30 a month?
Of the providers we verified, Bridge Voice does: £30 buys 250 minutes, against 150 minutes at The VoIP Shop for the same money. That works out at 12p/min compared with 20p a minute. Cyberstaff, Fonio.ai and AIAnswerPhone have no tier at this price, starting at £45 plus VAT, €99 and £47 respectively. Checked 4 August 2026.
How much does an AI receptionist cost in the UK?
Entry plans from the providers we checked run from £30 to £97 a month, and quote-only services start higher. The monthly figure matters less than the effective rate: divide the price by the included minutes. Verified entry rates ranged from 12p/min to 30p a minute for the same kind of service, so the cheapest headline price is often not the cheapest service.
Which AI receptionist providers publish their prices?
Bridge Voice, The VoIP Shop, AIAnswerPhone and Fonio.ai publish plan pricing on their websites. Cyberstaff does not: its tiers appear in a help centre article rather than on the site itself, and inside the product once you have an account. Electronic Receptionist publishes a "from" price without allowances, and Moneypenny prices telephone answering by individual quote. Publishing a monthly price is not the same as publishing the whole cost, though: AIAnswerPhone and Electronic Receptionist do not publish an overage rate, and The VoIP Shop currently shows two pricing tables that contradict each other.
Can an AI receptionist answer more than one call at once?
It depends entirely on the provider, and it is the question most often skipped. Fonio.ai's entry plan handles one call at a time and its middle plan handles three, so a second simultaneous caller waits. Bridge Voice and Cyberstaff both answer multiple calls at once. If you are buying an AI receptionist to stop missing calls at your busiest moment, check this before the price.
Do AI receptionists include call transcripts?
Not all of them. Bridge Voice, Cyberstaff and AIAnswerPhone all include transcripts on every tier. Some providers do not record or transcribe at all, and others charge per call for it. A transcript is the only way to audit what your receptionist told a customer, so it is worth confirming rather than assuming.
Is there a UK AI receptionist with a free trial?
Free trials are rare among AI-native providers. Of those we checked, none of Cyberstaff, The VoIP Shop or AIAnswerPhone advertises one, Fonio.ai offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, and Electronic Receptionist advertises a trial without publishing its terms. Bridge Voice includes a 14-day trial with 100 free minutes on Starter, Lite and Growth, with no contract to leave afterwards.
What should I check before signing up to an AI receptionist?
Six things: whether you are buying minutes or calls, what the overage rate is once you pass the allowance, how many calls it answers simultaneously, whether transcripts are included, whether the headline price includes VAT, and what the actual exit terms are behind a "no contracts" claim. A cheap headline price with a 65p overage and a twelve-month minimum term is not a cheap service.
Stop comparing tables. Put it on your own calls.
Fourteen days with 100 free minutes, on your real phone line, with a transcript of every call so you can judge it on evidence rather than a feature list.
Or hear it first: +44 151 453 6966