What does Jobber's AI Receptionist cost at real call volume?

The $29 is Jobber's own figure, shown on its pricing page and spelled out in its Help Center:

"Receptionist is included on the Plus Plan with unlimited usage. Receptionist can be added-on to select plans for $29 per month, which includes 30 conversations. If you go over 30 conversations in a billing cycle, Jobber charges $0.79 per additional conversation. Conversations tagged as 'no conversation' or 'spam' do not count towards your conversation total."

Source: help.getjobber.com, Receptionist powered by Jobber AI, read 2026-10-04.

Some third party comparison sites still quote $99 a month for Receptionist. Jobber's own pages do not: the pricing page shows $29, and the features page shows no price at all. Go by Jobber's number, and confirm it in your own account at checkout.

Credit where it is due. Jobber publishes plan prices on the open web with no sales call, and it is the only field service platform that publishes what its AI receptionist costs at all. Jobber launched Receptionist in August 2025. It answers calls and texts around the clock, offers to book visits, screens junk callers, and texts back missed calls.

One requirement that catches people: you can keep your existing phone number, but Receptionist still needs a dedicated phone number inside Jobber. Those are available in the US, Canada and the UK.

Thirty conversations is not a month for a working home service business. It is closer to a week. Here is the arithmetic at $0.79 per additional conversation:

Two things fall out of that table.

The first is that the honest price for a busy shop is $163 to $400 a month, not $29. If you are budgeting off the number on the pricing page, you are budgeting for a quiet business.

The second is that there is a crossover, and it comes sooner than most owners expect. At 500 conversations the add-on alone is $400 a month, while Plus, with unlimited Receptionist included, starts at $499 for 5 users. Plus also folds in the Marketing Suite, which otherwise costs $99 a month.

The fair comparison is your current plan plus the add-on against Plus at the same number of users. On month-to-month prices, a 5-user team on Grow pays $299, which is $200 less than Plus, and the add-on uses up that $200 at around 250 conversations a month. A 5-user team on Connect pays $199, a $300 gap, and crosses over at around 375 conversations. Because Plus starts at 5 users, a small team does not have to buy seats it will not use to get unlimited Receptionist.

Receptionist is not sold on its own. There is a Jobber subscription under it, starting at $49 a month for Core and running to $699 a month for Plus with 15 users, month to month. Jobber prices every plan three ways, which is exactly why no two articles about Jobber pricing agree.

Jobber's pricing page offers month to month with no commitment, monthly with a one year commitment, and annual. These are the no-commitment monthly figures:

Additional users are $29 each per month. The one year commitment column is cheaper: Core is $39 there, and Connect is $119 for 1 user and $169 for 5, which is why older articles quote those figures. Payment processing runs 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per card transaction, 2.7 percent plus $0.30 for Tap to Pay, and 1 percent for ACH, on top of everything above.

Source: getjobber.com/pricing, read 2026-10-04. Check your own checkout screen, because three billing modes means two owners can quote different Jobber prices and both be telling the truth.

The important column is not the price. It is what the price includes, because almost every one of these meters.

Prices read on 2026-10-04 from each vendor's own pricing page where one exists. Sameday per sameday.ai/pricing. Allo per withallo.com/pricing, which states the receptionist costs the same as a Business seat. Avoca publishes nothing, which is why every article about it hedges.

Two notes on that table. Goodcall bills per unique caller rather than per minute, which is cheap for a business with a small repeat client list and expensive for one with lots of first-time callers. And Smith.ai is deliberately absent: it is a credible hybrid of AI and live humans, but its published pricing changed at least three times during 2026, so any number printed here would be wrong by the time you read it. Check their page directly.

Read the table honestly and Jobber's add-on wins on price for most shops under a few hundred conversations a month. That is not a close call, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

If you already run Jobber, your call volume is modest, and what you need is for the phone to stop going to voicemail, buy the add-on. It is native, there is no integration to build, it is one bill, and at 100 conversations a month it costs $84. Nobody should pay a consultant to replace that.

The same logic applies if you run Workiz, Housecall Pro or ServiceTitan. Price what your existing platform sells first. Starting anywhere else means paying to solve a problem your current vendor may already have solved.

Three situations, and they are worth being specific about.

The first is volume. Past roughly 300 conversations a month you are paying $242 and climbing on a tool you do not control, and the meter keeps running through your busy season. HVAC call volume is not flat. It spikes in July and January, which is exactly when the overage compounds.

The second is what happens after the call. Answering the phone and booking a visit is the easy half. The harder half is the dead list: customers who called eighteen months ago, got a quote, and never booked. Reactivating those is a campaign, not a receptionist, and no platform add-on does it.

The third is configuration. A native add-on is configured by you, maintained by you, and when it books the wrong job into the wrong slot at 2am, that is yours too. Done for you is a different product than software, and it is worth a different price only if someone is genuinely doing it for you.

Here is the comparison that matters. A human dispatcher costs roughly $2,500 to $3,300 a month once you count benefits, answers one call at a time, and works one shift. The question is never whether an AI receptionist beats a $29 add-on. It is what it costs you to have somebody answer that phone at nine at night in July.