Smith.ai alternative that runs the whole discovery conversation

Smith.ai publishes more of its rate card than anyone else in this category, which is genuinely to its credit, and it also means you can do arithmetic nobody else in the market lets you do. Starter is $300 for 30 calls, so the base rate is $10.00 a call. That $10.00 buys the answer, lead qualification against your criteria, and new client intake limited to 5 short answer questions.

Now price the call a law firm actually wants. Extended intake to ask six more questions is $1.50. Going beyond that is $0.25 per question, so four more is $1.00. Booking the appointment is $1.50. Taking the consultation fee is $1.00. A conflict check is $0.50. Recording and transcribing the call is $0.25. A text or email follow-up asking the caller to send documents is $0.50. An SMS or Slack notification so someone at the firm knows is $0.50. That is $6.75 of add-ons on a $10.00 call, a 67.5 percent uplift, and none of it is optional if you want the call to actually produce a booked, qualified, paid consultation.

Two more meters sit outside the per-call menu and catch firms out. Transfer destinations are limited: Starter includes one, Basic two, Pro ten, and each additional destination is $15 a month, so a four attorney firm on Starter that wants calls routed to each attorney adds $45 a month before a single call is answered. CRM integrations are first-one-free, then $0.50 per call for each additional CRM. Outbound business caller ID is $10 a month and inbound call tracking numbers are $5 each per month. All figures re-read from the Smith.ai pricing page on 29 August 2026.

Charging per question is a perfectly rational way to price human labor, because each additional question really does consume another few seconds of a person who is being paid. The problem is what it does to the firm on the other end of the invoice. Once depth has a price tag, somebody at the firm starts deciding which questions are worth $0.25, and that decision gets made by whoever is watching the monthly bill rather than by whoever will run the consultation.

The questions that get cut are predictable. They are the ones that only sometimes matter: the date of the incident that turns out to be past the statute, the prior attorney that turns out to be a conflict, the insurer that turns out to be one you cannot sue. Those questions have low average value and enormous occasional value, which is exactly the profile that per-unit pricing eliminates. A five question intake will always look cheaper than a twenty question intake and will sometimes cost you the case.

This is not an argument that Smith.ai is overpriced. At $10 a call for a real person answering 24/7 in your firm name, it is competitive, and the transparency is better than the category norm. It is an argument about the unit. We price per firm, at a planned $49 to $299 a month, precisely so that nobody has to decide whether the sixth question is worth paying for. The AI asks whatever the matter needs, every time, and a thorough intake costs the same as a shallow one.

A live person answering the phone is not a feature an AI replaces cleanly, and we are not going to claim otherwise. Smith.ai staffs its lines with US based agents around the clock, with no overseas agents, and a caller who is distressed, confused, elderly or angry gets a human being who can hear that and respond to it. If your practice takes emotionally difficult calls, or if a meaningful share of your callers would simply hang up on anything automated, that is worth paying for and the add-on arithmetic above is a reasonable price for it.

The commercial terms are also among the cleanest in this market. No setup fees, month to month, a 30 day money back guarantee, no charge for spam calls, a dedicated local or toll free number included, port your existing number at no cost, and lead qualification included free rather than sold as an upgrade. Smith.ai says it serves more than 5,000 businesses, and it now offers an AI-first, hybrid, or human-first choice rather than forcing one model. Compared to the answering services that will not publish a rate at all, this is the transparent end of the category.

The honest dividing line is what happens after the phone is answered. Smith.ai delivers structured answers and a call summary into your CRM. That is a good handoff and it is not a prepped brief. If the bottleneck at your firm is that nobody picks up, buy Smith.ai. If the bottleneck is that the person who picks up cannot go deep enough to tell you whether the matter is worth your time, that is a different purchase.

Re-read on 1 September 2026, every Smith.ai rate is unchanged: $300 for 30 calls, $810 for 90 and $2,100 for 300, with overage at $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 a call. Divide the plans and the included rates are $10.00, $9.00 and $7.00. Put those two rows next to each other and something shows up that no review of Smith.ai mentions: every overage rate is above the included rate you already pay, by 15 percent on Starter, 17 percent on Basic and 21 percent on Pro. The penalty gets worse as the plan gets bigger, which is the opposite of how volume pricing normally works.

That direction turns out to be the cleanest single test in this category, because it splits the market almost perfectly. AI answering vendors price overage below their own included rate. Goodcall charges a flat $0.50 per unique customer past the cap against included rates of $0.79, $0.52 and $0.50, so on its entry plan going over is 37 percent cheaper than staying inside. Rosie sells 25 website texting conversations for $50, which is $2.00 each, then charges $1.00 for each one after, exactly half. Human-staffed vendors price it above: Smith.ai by 15 to 21 percent, and Ruby by an amount nobody can compute because Ruby publishes no overage rate at all. The reason is not mysterious. Marginal AI capacity is nearly free and marginal human capacity is not. But it means a busy month is a discount on one kind of platform and a surcharge on the other, and that is worth knowing before you size a plan.

One more thing is only visible with both rate cards open, and it cuts in Smith.ai favour, so it belongs on this page rather than only on the one about Ruby. Ruby publishes a comparison table that sets its own model against an unnamed column headed Others, and on the numbers that column is Smith.ai rate card. Seven of nine rows match Smith.ai published rates exactly: extended intake at $1.50 for six additional questions then $0.25 each, transfer lines at $15 per line per month, additional CRM integrations at $0.50 per call, bilingual answering at $1.00 per call, payment collection at $1.00 per call, ad tracking lines at $5 per line per month, and appointment scheduling between $1.50 and $2.50.

Two rows do not match, and both understate Smith.ai. Ruby column says the other service offers three simple intake questions for free, where Smith.ai currently publishes five. And it says the other service is closed after hours and on holidays, where Smith.ai publishes 24/7 answering with no after hours premium. We compete with Smith.ai and it would be convenient for us to leave those two rows unchallenged. They are wrong, and a comparison you cannot trust in your competitor favour is not worth reading in your own.