Smith.ai pricing 2026: Smith.ai cost per call, plans and add on rates

Read on 30 August 2026, Smith.ai publishes three self serve plans and one quoted tier, and it prices them by the call rather than by the minute. Starter is $300 a month and includes 30 calls. Basic is $810 a month for 90 calls. Pro is $2,100 a month for 300 calls. Enterprise is described as a custom plan with no figure attached. Every one of those rates has been unchanged since our July 2026 reading and again on 29 August, so this is a stable card rather than a moving target.

Divide it out and the included rate per call is $10.00 on Starter, $9.00 on Basic and $7.00 on Pro. That is the number to hold in your head, because it is the only one the plan price actually buys. Going from Starter to Pro is a 30 percent discount per call in exchange for committing to ten times the volume, which is a normal enough shape.

Per call billing is the single most important structural fact about Smith.ai, and it cuts both ways. Against a per minute answering service, a long call is a bargain: a caller who talks for fourteen minutes about a car accident costs the same $10.00 as someone who dials a wrong number. Smith.ai makes this an explicit selling point and states that it does not rush callers off the phone. Against the same service, a high volume of short calls is expensive, because a thirty second call also costs $10.00. If most of your inbound is quick scheduling traffic from existing clients, per call is the wrong meter for you.

Two terms attached to the plans are genuinely good and worth naming. Smith.ai charges nothing for spam calls, which on a marketing heavy phone line is a real saving rather than a gesture. And 24/7 coverage carries no premium: Smith.ai states plainly that calls at 2pm and 2am cost the same, where much of the answering category charges extra for after hours. There are no setup fees, and you can port your existing number in at no charge.

This is the detail most reviews skip, and it is published in plain sight. Smith.ai overage is $11.50 a call over 30 on Starter, $10.50 over 90 on Basic and $8.50 over 300 on Pro. Set those against the included per call rates of $10.00, $9.00 and $7.00 and every plan charges more for the calls beyond your allowance than for the ones inside it.

The premium is 15 percent on Starter, 16.7 percent on Basic and 21.4 percent on Pro. Read that sequence again, because it runs the wrong way round from intuition. The bigger your commitment, the harsher the penalty for guessing your volume too low. A Pro firm that commits to 300 calls and takes 360 pays $2,100 plus 60 at $8.50, which is $2,610, and those extra sixty calls cost 21 percent more each than the three hundred it planned for.

The practical advice is unglamorous but it is worth real money: size the plan to your busy month, not your average one. In this structure the cost of buying slightly too much capacity is far lower than the cost of buying slightly too little, and legal inbound is seasonal and campaign driven in ways that make averages misleading. If you run ads, your call volume is a function of your marketing calendar, and the overage rate is the price of forgetting that.

Here is the part that changes the budget. Smith.ai includes, at no extra charge, 24/7 live answering, lead qualification, a dedicated business number, the first CRM or Zapier integration, and new client intake capped at five short answer questions. Five questions is enough to take a name, a number, an email, a matter type and a source. It is not enough to run legal intake.

Everything past that is priced per call, and Smith.ai lists all of it. Extended intake, which adds six further questions, is $1.50. Beyond those, custom extended intake is $0.25 per question with no cap on how many you ask. Booking the appointment on your calendar is $1.50. Taking a payment is $1.00. Running a conflict check against your CRM is $0.50. Call recording and transcription is $0.25. A text or email follow up is $0.50. An SMS or Slack notification is $0.50, with $0.25 for each additional ping if the first person does not pick up, and Microsoft Teams notifications are priced the same. Third party intake, meaning your receptionist filling in someone else form, is $1.00. Complex call routing is $1.50, custom calendaring is $1.00, a dedicated Spanish line is $1.00, accepting collect calls is $0.50, and each additional CRM beyond the first is $0.50 per call.

Now build the call a personal injury or family firm actually wants. Answer it, run extended intake, ask four more questions than that covers, check for conflicts, book the consultation, take the deposit, record and transcribe, send the follow up and ping the attorney. That is $1.50 plus $1.00 plus $0.50 plus $1.50 plus $1.00 plus $0.25 plus $0.50 plus $0.50, which is $6.75 of add ons sitting on a $10.00 Starter call. The call costs about $16.75, roughly 68 percent above the advertised rate.

Carry that across the plan and Starter is not $300 a month, it is $300 plus 30 times $6.75, which is $502.50, or just over $6,000 a year against an advertised $3,600. None of this is hidden and none of it is unreasonable, because a human being really is doing each of those things. But the number you should compare against other vendors is $16.75, and the number almost every comparison article uses is $10.00.

There is a structural point underneath the arithmetic that matters more than the dollars. Per unit pricing on intake depth makes a firm ration the questions that only sometimes matter. The statute of limitations date, prior counsel, whether the defendant is insured: each is worth $0.25 on the vast majority of calls and worth an enormous amount on a small handful. That is precisely the profile that per question pricing trains you to cut, and the calls where you cut it are the ones you most needed the answer on.

Three add ons are billed monthly rather than per call, and one of them regularly surprises multi attorney firms. Additional transfer destinations are $15 a month each. A transfer destination is a line or extension Smith.ai can put a caller through to, and Starter includes exactly one.

Work through what that means for a real firm. Four attorneys who each want calls transferred to them directly need four destinations. Starter gives you one, so the other three are $45 a month, which is $540 a year on top of the plan, before a single call is answered. Basic includes two destinations and Pro includes ten, so the charge disappears at scale and bites hardest on exactly the small firms buying the cheapest plan.

The other two monthly items are smaller and easier to plan for. Business caller ID for outbound calls, so your clients see your number rather than an unfamiliar one when Smith.ai calls out on your behalf, is $10 a month. Inbound call tracking numbers, for attributing calls to specific marketing campaigns, are $5 per number per month with no limit on how many you buy.

One term is worth reading carefully because it is easy to overstate in either direction. Smith.ai offers a 30 day money back guarantee covering your plan and any add on services regardless of how many calls you have used, and that guarantee is capped at $1,000. On Starter, at $300 a month, the cap never binds. On Pro at $2,100 it binds immediately, so a firm trialing the top plan is protected for under half of one month of spend. That is a perfectly normal commercial limit, and it is worth knowing before you treat the guarantee as risk free at the high end.

Smith.ai bills per call. Ruby, the other best known name in this category, bills per minute: read on 30 August 2026, Ruby publishes $250 for 50 minutes, $395 for 100, $720 for 200 and $1,725 for 500. Those are two different meters, and which one is cheaper depends entirely on how long your calls run.

Do the crossover. Ruby entry plan is $5.00 per included minute, the most expensive per minute rate in the group of live answering vendors we have measured. At a five minute average intake call, Ruby 50 minutes buys about ten calls for $250, which is $25 a call. Smith.ai Starter buys thirty calls for $300, which is $10. Even loaded with every add on at $16.75, Smith.ai is meaningfully cheaper per intake call than Ruby at the entry tier, and the gap widens as calls get longer because Smith.ai does not charge for length at all.

Ruby wins on a different axis, and it is a real one. Every Ruby plan carries identical features and the only difference between tiers is the number of minutes, which makes Ruby the rare vendor in this market that gates nothing behind a higher tier. There is no per question charge, no booking fee, no conflict check line item. If you hate itemized billing and want a predictable relationship with real people in Oregon and Arizona answering in your firm name, that is worth something the spreadsheet will not show you.

The third meter is flat per firm, which is how we bill. Consultations planned pricing is $49 to $299 a month for the whole firm regardless of call volume or headcount, and it is planned launch pricing rather than a checkout you can complete today. The honest case for it is that inquiry volume is set by your marketing spend, your referrals and your reputation, and none of those track the number of lawyers you employ or the number of minutes a caller needs. The honest case against it is that a solo practice taking eight inquiries a month will pay less on Smith.ai Starter than on anything flat, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

What Smith.ai sells that we do not is human judgment on the phone. Real US based receptionists, no overseas agents, who can hear that a caller is distressed and respond to it. What we do that a per call service structurally cannot is run every question that might matter on every call without the meter ticking, because the marginal question costs nothing. Firms usually pick on that axis rather than on price.