After-hours answering: what people, AI and voicemail each cost

Your four choices after hours

At seven in the evening the phone still rings. Four things can happen. It goes to voicemail. You or a staff member picks it up. A live answering service picks it up. Or software picks it up. Each one costs a different amount and gives the caller a different experience.

Voicemail is already paid for. If you run a business line, the voicemail is part of the plan, and on most plans it will email you the message as text. Ooma Office Pro is CDN$29.95 per user per month in Canadian dollars and converts the recording to text automatically ¹.

The problem with voicemail is not the price. It is the caller with water coming through a ceiling, who will hang up and dial the next name on the list. You never see that call, so you never count it. That is the number the rest of this page is really about.

Answering it yourself is not free

Most owners start here, because it looks free. It is not. It costs your evening, and it goes badly on the nights you are asleep, driving or with your family.

Putting a staff member on call brings rules. In Alberta, being on call or on standby is not by itself considered work, and if an employee is not required to perform work at home, no payment is required ². But once you require them to do work, they must be paid for at least 3 hours of pay at the minimum wage ², which for most employees is $15 an hour ³.

So one call on a quiet evening can trigger that minimum. Read the rule before you ask anyone to keep their phone on, and write down what you agreed. If you pay above minimum wage, check which rate applies to a call-out.

What a live answering service costs

Live services bill in one of three ways: by the minute, by the call, or as a flat monthly package. The billing method matters more than the headline price, because your after-hours calls are probably short and come in bursts.

Per minute is the common one. PATLive's pay as you go plan is $49 a month with no included minutes and $2.99 for each minute a receptionist is on your call. Its 200 minute plan is $349 a month with extra minutes at $1.99, and 24/7 answering is in every plan with no night or weekend fees ⁴. Specialty Answering Service starts at $44 a month with no included minutes at $1.54 a minute, and its 100 minute plan is $159 with extra minutes at $1.44 ⁵. Neither page names a currency.

Per call suits short, simple messages. AnswerCanada's Economy plan is $36 for 20 call credits at $1.80 a credit, and its Small Business plan is $100 for 66 credits plus 8 bonus credits at $1.52 each ⁶. A wrong number costs the same as a booking, so this works best if your callers get to the point.

Flat packages cost more and ask you to think less. Telelink's packages start at $275 a month and cover after hours, evenings, weekends and holidays. The company claims nearly every call is answered in 30 seconds or less ⁷. Abby starts at $164 a month for 50 of its minutes ⁸. Treat any answer-speed claim on a vendor page as a sales claim until you have tested it yourself.

AI answering bills flat

Software answers on the first ring and does not care that it is a Sunday. Simple Phones starts at $97 a month for 100 calls, with a 14 day free trial ⁹. Read the limits before you commit. That same page says if you exceed the calls in your tier, your phone numbers will be released ⁹. A busy month on a small plan can take your number away.

Some services now bill people and AI on the same meter. On Abby's plans, a minute of a person uses one of its minutes and a minute of AI uses half ⁸. That tells you how the two compare on cost in the eyes of a company that sells both.

One warning on price. None of these pages names a currency. The Bank of Canada put the US dollar at CA$1.3994 today ¹⁰, so a US-billed plan lands higher on your statement than the sticker, before GST. Ask the vendor in writing which currency they charge in. If you want the longer version on what AI phone agents can and cannot do, read our playbook on AI receptionists.

Clinics must arrange after-hours access

If you run a medical clinic in Alberta, this is not only a service decision. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta requires a regulated member to make sure patients are provided with information on how to access care after hours ¹¹. The same standard says the member must directly provide or arrange that after-hours care through a provider or service that can assess and triage care needs, must have a process for critical results that come in after regular working hours, and must not charge patients for insured after-hours access ¹¹.

A greeting that says the office is closed until Monday does not meet that. An answering service that can triage and reach the on-call physician does, and so does a formal arrangement with another provider. If your recorded message sends patients somewhere else, the standard also wants evidence of an agreement with whoever you are sending them to ¹¹.

Put Health Link at 811 in your greeting as well. It is a free 24/7 line, registered nurses answer it, and they help the caller decide whether they need urgent care ¹². If you are a dentist, a vet or any other regulated professional, check your own college's standards before you choose, because the rules are not the same across professions.

Start with a month of call records

Ask your phone provider for a month of call records. Count the calls that came in after you closed, then listen to the voicemails and sort them into three piles: emergencies, bookings, and questions already answered on your website.

If most of the pile is bookings and simple questions, software or a clear voicemail greeting with a morning callback is enough. If the pile is emergencies that need judgment, pay for people and expect to pay by the minute. If you get a handful of calls a month, a per call plan beats a flat package. If you get a flood, the flat package stops the bleeding.

Whatever you choose, test it yourself from the truck or the back room before you trust it with customers, and check the first week of messages line by line.

A ready-made answering service or an off-the-shelf AI phone agent is the right answer for most trades and clinics, and it is live this week. Custom work only earns its cost when the after-hours call has to read or write something in your own booking, dispatch or job system, so the caller gets a real answer instead of a promise that someone will call back.