The short answer
A person at a desk costs a lot more than their hourly wage, and they cover less than a quarter of the hours in a week. An AI receptionist costs a flat monthly fee and never clocks out. Which one is right depends on what you actually need the phone to do. Below is the math, with assumptions you can change.
What a human receptionist costs
We are not going to tell you what receptionists earn in your area; you know that better than we do, and it changes. Here is the formula, with an example wage so you can see how it works.
| Line | Example | Your number |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly wage (example assumption) | $20 | |
| Hours a year, full time (40 x 52) | 2,080 | 2,080 |
| Wages a year | $41,600 | |
| Payroll taxes, workers' comp, benefits (example: 15%) | $6,240 | Ask your accountant |
| Total a year | $47,840 | |
| Total a month | about $3,990 |
That still leaves out costs that are real but hard to put on a line:
- Hiring and training. Time spent interviewing, then teaching someone your services, your pricing rules and your service area.
- Turnover. When they leave, you start over.
- Coverage gaps. Lunch, sick days, vacation, and every hour outside the shift.
- A place to sit. A desk, a computer, a phone system.
The hours problem
A week has 168 hours. A full-time shift covers 40 of them. That is about 24% of the week.
The other 76% is nights, early mornings and weekends: when the water heater leaks at 9 PM, when a homeowner finally sits down on Saturday to get quotes, when a monsoon storm rolls through on a Sunday. A receptionist, however good, is not there for those calls.
One more way to see it, using the example above: about $3,990 a month for roughly 173 covered hours is about $23 per hour the phone is covered. $897 a month (the Partnership price) for all 728 hours in a month is about $1.23 per covered hour.
What an AI receptionist costs
AI receptionists are usually billed monthly. Viridia's comes as part of The Viridia Partnership at $897 a month, flat, month to month, with no setup fee and no contract. That's $10,764 a year, and it includes more than the phone:
- An AI receptionist that answers 24/7 and books estimates on your calendar
- Missed-call text-back for anything that slips through
- Vesaya, our app, so you know who's waiting and who owes you without digging
- Your Google Business Profile and Yelp page connected and working together
- A business number, and follow-up texts drafted for you to approve
It doesn't go up when the phone rings more. There's no per-minute billing and no after-hours charge. Prefer to run it yourself? The receptionist is a $97 a month add-on to Vesaya's $119 plan at vesaya.app.
Side by side
| Human receptionist | Viridia AI receptionist | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Wage x 2,080 hours, plus taxes and benefits | $897 a month in the Partnership, or $97 a month added to Vesaya |
| Hours covered | About 40 a week | All 168 |
| Sick days and turnover | Yes | No |
| Books estimates on your calendar | Yes, during the shift | Yes, any time |
| In-person work (walk-ins, paperwork, filing) | Yes | No |
| Reading a tricky conversation | Better | Routes it to you |
Where a human still wins
Be honest with yourself about what the job is. A person is the better choice when:
- You have walk-in customers or a showroom.
- The role is half phone, half office work: permits, ordering, invoices, chasing payments.
- You handle long-running commercial accounts where the relationship is the product.
Plenty of businesses use both. The office person handles the desk during the day, and the AI answers whenever they are busy, at lunch, or gone for the night. The receptionist stops being the bottleneck and the phone stops going to voicemail.
The real question to ask
Forget the averages and look at your own week. What happens right now to a call that comes in at 7 PM on a Saturday? If the honest answer is “voicemail, and I call back Monday,” that call is probably booked with someone else by Monday. That's the gap to price, whichever option you choose.
How Viridia handles this
We build the AI receptionist with you on a setup call: your services, your area, your calendar and the calls that should ring straight through to you. It answers every call, books the estimate and texts back anything it misses, for $897 a month as part of The Viridia Partnership. See how it works on the answering service for contractors page.