Nobody in this category publishes a straight answer to this, including, for a long time, us. So here is the range, where it comes from, and the honest conditions under which it is a bad buy.
AI receptionist pricing for a medical practice typically runs between $150 and $2,000 a month for a single location, depending on call volume and on which of four pricing models the vendor uses. Practices at the low end are quiet single provider offices; practices at the high end are taking well over a thousand calls a month or running several locations.
That is a wide range because the models are not comparable to each other, which is the actual problem when you try to shop this. Below is how to make them comparable.
What pricing models do vendors use?
Four, and knowing which one you are being quoted tells you more than the number does.
| Model | How it scales | Who it suits | What to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per minute | With how long calls run | Low volume, short calls | A chatty patient population costs you more than a busy one |
| Per call | With call count | Predictable volume | A thirty second wrong number costs the same as a five minute booking |
| Per seat or per provider | With headcount | Nobody, in my view | Hiring a receptionist or adding a provider raises your phone bill |
| Monthly, by included minutes | With practice size, in steps | Most practices | The overage rate matters as much as the tier price |
The per seat model deserves the sharp comment. It is inherited from general business software, where seats correlate with usage. In a practice they do not. Your call volume is driven by your patient panel, not by how many people work there, so a five provider practice on per seat pricing is paying five times for one phone line. If you are quoted per seat, ask what it would cost per month at your actual call volume and compare that number instead.
MedPhone bills monthly on included call minutes, starting at $150 a month, with a published overage rate rather than a renegotiation. That is a disclosure, not a pitch, so you can weigh the rest of this knowing where I sit.
What is included and what costs extra?
This is where quotes stop being comparable. The headline price is rarely the whole cost stack. Ask about each of these explicitly.
- Implementation or onboarding fee. Ranges from nothing to several thousand dollars. Ask whether it is waived on an annual commitment, because it often is
- EHR integration fee. Some vendors charge separately for the integration, some fold it in, and some charge only for EHRs outside their standard list
- Overage. What happens when you go past the included minutes or calls. A published per minute rate is a good sign. Silence is not
- Additional locations. Whether a second site is a second subscription or shares the same pool of minutes. For groups this is the single biggest lever in the whole quote
- Phone number porting and telephony. Usually small, occasionally not, and occasionally billed by a third party you did not know was in the chain
- Support tier. Whether configuration changes after go live are included or billed as professional services
- Contract term. Monthly, annual, or multi year, and what the early termination position is
The question that flushes all of this out in one go: what will my invoice say in month three, itemized, at my call volume? A vendor who cannot answer that in writing is quoting you a headline, not a price.
How does the cost compare to hiring?
This is the comparison every practice owner actually wants, and it is closer than the marketing in this category suggests, because the honest version does not assume you fire anybody.
A medical secretary or receptionist has a base salary of roughly $35,000 in the US, per BLS occupational employment data, with urban markets running perhaps twenty percent above and rural markets fifteen percent below. Fully loaded, once payroll taxes at around eight percent, health insurance, retirement, paid time off, equipment, an EHR seat and the amortized cost of turnover are all in, the real figure lands between $50,000 and $54,000. I use $52,000.
| Front desk hire | AI receptionist | |
|---|---|---|
| All in annual cost | About $52,000 | $1,800 to $24,000 |
| Hours of phone coverage | 40 a week, less interruptions | 168 a week |
| Concurrent calls | 1 | Unlimited |
| Absence and turnover | About 10 days, 25% annual turnover | None |
| Does check in and the waiting room | Yes | No |
| Handles a distressed patient | Yes | No, transfers |
The last two rows are the reason this is not a swap. In every deployment I have been involved in, the practice kept its staff and moved them off the phone. So the correct framing is not payroll savings. It is the calls you were not answering, plus the hours your existing staff get back, set against a cost that is a fraction of a hire.
When does an AI receptionist not pay for itself?
Three situations, and I would rather you find them here than in month four.
Below roughly two hundred inbound calls a month. At that volume the missed call revenue you can recover is small enough that almost any subscription is hard to justify, and the same money spent on fixing call routing or adding a shared after hours line does more. The arithmetic is not close at fifty calls a month, and it is genuinely marginal between one hundred and two hundred.
When your abandonment rate is already low. If your phone system reports five percent abandoned and you have no after hours volume, there is very little to recover. The value in this category comes almost entirely from calls that are currently going unanswered. No missed calls, no return.
When the front desk problem is not the phone. If the bottleneck is check in, insurance verification or prior authorization, taking the phone away helps at the margin and does not touch the actual constraint. That is a workflow problem and buying a phone product will not fix it.
There is a fourth case that is less about arithmetic. Concierge and high touch specialty practices sell the fact that a specific person answers. If that is your product, do not automate it, however good the economics look.
The arithmetic that decides it
Work out what you are losing before you work out what you would pay. The chain has five steps and most vendor calculators skip the middle two, which is how they arrive at numbers roughly three times too large.
- Take your monthly inbound call volume and your abandonment rate. A busy primary care practice runs 15 to 25 percent abandoned
- Multiply by 15 percent, the MGMA benchmark for the share of inbound calls that are new patient inquiries
- Multiply by 50 percent, because not every inquiry becomes a booked patient even when the call is answered well
- Multiply by 65 percent, because roughly a third of people who cannot get through do try again
- Multiply by your patient lifetime value. Primary care averages $3,000, per Physicians Weekly in 2021
At 800 calls a month and 20 percent abandoned, that is about 94 patients a year and roughly $282,000 in lifetime revenue. Set your quote against that number rather than against your payroll, and the decision usually makes itself in either direction.
Run it on your own call volume
Sources
Questions people ask
How much does an AI receptionist cost for a medical practice?
Between roughly $150 and $2,000 a month for a single location, depending on call volume and pricing model. Most single location primary care practices land somewhere between $600 and $1,400 a month once their real call minutes are known, which is well above the entry tier of any vendor including ours. Multi location groups should be priced on pooled minutes rather than per site.
Is there usually a setup fee?
Often, ranging from nothing to several thousand dollars, and it is frequently waived on an annual commitment. Ask directly, and ask whether it covers call flow configuration or only the technical integration.
What is a fair overage rate?
The more useful question is whether the rate is published at all. A vendor with a stated per minute overage is telling you what a busy month costs. A vendor who will not quote one is reserving the right to renegotiate when your volume grows.
Do multi location groups pay per site?
With some vendors yes, which is usually the worst structure available to a group. Ask whether minutes pool across locations under one agreement. For a group of any size that single term moves the total more than the headline price does.
Is an annual contract worth it?
It is worth it if the discount is real and the exit terms are fair. What I would not do is sign annual before a pilot. Ask for thirty to ninety days on a monthly term first, then commit once you have seen your own containment numbers.
How does this compare to an answering service?
Answering services usually bill per minute or per call and often land in a similar monthly range at moderate volume. The difference is not the price, it is that an answering service takes a message and an AI receptionist completes the booking, so the callback work stays with your staff in one case and disappears in the other.
Written by
Agni Patel is the founder and CEO of MedPhone. He has quoted this category from the inside for two years and has lost deals on price honestly.