What Does an AI Phone Assistant Cost? Pricing Models

For a small or mid-sized business in Germany, an AI phone assistant costs anywhere from €0 in base fees on pure per-minute billing (around €0.35 per minute of conversation) to about €330 a month for bundles of 500 to 1,500 minutes, as of September 2026; entry tariffs with 100 minutes run €32 to €99. On top of that, several providers charge a one-off setup fee, from €199 for standard packages to €14,900 for individually configured projects aimed at the Mittelstand, Germany’s mid-sized firms; Priovox charges no setup fee on any plan, Enterprise included. The rest of your bill is decided by the price of extra minutes, the phone number, call transfers and the minimum term. At an average of 3 minutes per call, 100 minutes covers roughly 33 calls.

What does an AI phone assistant cost per month?

Tariffs for a business with one phone line run from €0 in base fees to around €330 a month (as of 29 September 2026, read on the linked pricing pages). For 100 included minutes, voiceOne charges €32 plus VAT, Agentino €49 plus VAT and our own Solo plan €99; our Team plan costs €299 for 500 minutes.

Above that it gets messy. Placetel AI bundles 750 minutes for €69 on a 24-month contract or €79 on a monthly one. fonio.ai gives you 1,000 minutes for €99 net on an annual subscription (€119 when paid monthly). HalloPetra takes €99 for 250 minutes, assistent24 €199 net for 250 minutes plus a €499 net setup package.

So the same monthly price buys 100 minutes at one provider and 1,000 at another. A bundled minute therefore costs anywhere from about €0.10 to almost €1, which is why the billing model says more about your invoice than the headline price the pricing page advertises. Note on German pricing: “netto” and “zzgl. MwSt.” mean the price excludes 19% VAT, which is added on top.

Which pricing models exist: per minute, per call or bundle?

Five models cover the German market. What separates them is who carries the risk of a quiet month or a hectic one: with pure usage billing you carry it, with a bundle the provider does, with a negotiated flat rate it gets haggled over.

The minute bundle is the most common model and the easiest one to miscalculate. A 100-minute bundle for €32 costs €0.32 per minute as long as all 100 get used. At 50 minutes used, it is €0.64. Above the bundle the overage price applies, €0.29 here, and €0.15 to €0.35 across the market.

Annual subscriptions lower the base fee, by varying amounts: voiceOne knocks off 10%, fonio.ai charges €99 instead of €119 (around 17%), Agentino shows €49 for its Basis plan whether paid monthly or annually. The discount costs flexibility. Switch the assistant off after four months and you have paid for eight months of nothing.

How many calls are 100 minutes?

Our calls last 3 minutes on average (based on 52 calls handled by our live agent in real use). With that figure, 100 minutes equals roughly 33 calls, 250 minutes roughly 83 and 500 minutes roughly 166. A tariff with 100 included minutes covers about one and a half calls per working day. Not more.

Your own number matters more than ours. For one week, count the calls the assistant should take (all of them, only the missed ones, or only those outside opening hours) and time them. Then: minutes per month = calls per working day × 21 working days × average call length.

Even 5 calls a day overshoot a 100-minute bundle by more than three times. Diverting 10 calls a day needs around 630 minutes, so a 750-minute bundle or 500 included minutes plus 130 extra. At 20 calls a day it is 1,260 minutes, the range where the tariffs with 1,000 to 1,500 minutes begin. Reference points by trade are on our industry pages.

Which costs are missing from the pricing page?

The base fee sits in large type; the rest is in the small print or the feature table. Seven line items that changed the monthly price in our sample of 29 September 2026:

• Setup. The item with the widest spread. Self-service tariffs often come without a separate fee: Agentino prints “0 € Einrichtung” (no setup fee) on all three plans, and Priovox charges none on any plan, Enterprise included. At several providers, though, setup is a product of its own. assistent24 charges €499 net one-off (a September promotional price for bookings until 30 September 2026), which spread over twelve months adds about €42 a month; ihretelefonzentrale.de charges €199, €349 or €999 net depending on the package. Individually configured setups for mid-sized firms cost far more; the table below this list has the figures.
• Phone number. Placetel AI requires an AI phone number at €9 a month, voiceOne bills a dedicated number from €1.99 a month, at fonio.ai one number is included and each further one costs €7. If you keep your existing number via call forwarding, you pay for the forwarded minute at your own carrier’s rate.
• Call transfer. When the assistant puts a call through, telephony minutes come on top: at Placetel AI €0.025 per minute to internal and €0.05 per minute to external destinations.
• Minimum term. smao Advanced runs for at least 12 months, Placetel Grow’s €69 applies only on 24 months, VITAS holds out up to 25% discount for 24 to 36 months.
• Parallel calls. According to its pricing page, fonio.ai’s Solo plan handles no simultaneous calls, while Placetel AI advertises unlimited parallel calls. For a business where three customers ring at once at 8 in the morning, this point decides whether the whole system is worth anything.
• Extra minutes. Between €0.15 (fonio.ai: 100-minute top-ups at €15) and €0.35 (Agentino Basis, smao Pay as you Go). Some pricing pages do not state the figure at all; then the question belongs in your first email to the provider.
• Extra channels and VAT. WhatsApp costs €39 a month extra at HalloPetra, €69 with 700 conversations at Placetel AI. And: fonio.ai, Agentino, voiceOne, assistent24 and VITAS quote net prices, to which 19% VAT is added; HalloPetra, Placetel and smao say nothing either way.

What does setup cost at each provider?

Setup is where self-service tariffs and Mittelstand projects drift furthest apart. Take a provider’s template and enter the call forwarding yourself, and you often pay nothing extra. Need a connection to your practice software, custom conversation flows or several processes, and you get a project with analysis, workshop and test phase, priced accordingly.

That sets the range. Standard packages cost €199 to €999 one-off. Individually configured projects for mid-sized firms reach, at the providers who publish figures at all, the high four-digit to low five-digit range: KI-Beratung Deutschland lists €7,900 for 2,000 minutes and €14,900 for 6,000, ihretelefonzentrale.de €4,999 for its pilot. Many Enterprise tiers publish no number. With us it stays at €0, on the Enterprise plan too, because the industry templates keep setup under 30 minutes in most cases and the team helps at no extra charge when it takes longer.

How do you compare offers properly?

The most useful metric is the price per answered call. It makes minute bundles, per-call prices and base fees comparable and shows at once whether a bundle fits your volume. The formula: (base fee + extra minutes × overage price + phone number + transfers + setup ÷ 12) ÷ calls answered per month.

The calculation below assumes 3 minutes per call and leaves out phone number, transfers and setup so the models stay visible; setup is added in the first-year view that follows. The usage tariffs are the market examples from the table above; the two bundles are our own offer, worked out in the open.

Two things stand out. The usage tariffs land at €0.58 to €1.76 per call in this example, our bundles at €1.80 to €3.00 (on the annual subscription at €84 and €254 a month, €2.55 and €1.53). And a half-used bundle doubles the price per call. The bundle has to match the volume you counted.

What does the first year cost, including setup?

The price per call leaves setup out. What decides the purchase is what leaves your account over the first year in total. Assumptions: 12 months at the monthly-cancellable price, plus the one-off setup as printed on the pricing page; no extra minutes, phone number, transfers or VAT. Included minutes are listed alongside because the bundles differ in size.

Setup accounts for about 17% of first-year cost at assistent24, 14% at ihretelefonzentrale.de Pro and 45% at KI-Beratung Deutschland. On the annual subscription our bundles come to €1,008 (Solo, €84 a month) and €3,048 (Team, €254 a month). Converted to the call, assistent24 Phone Business costs €2.90 per call instead of €2.40 once setup ÷ 12 is included, at 83 fully used calls a month; our Team plan stays at €1.80 because there is no lump sum to spread. Digital Apes (from €1,490 setup plus from €568 a month, so from €8,306 in year one) and the ihretelefonzentrale.de pilot (€4,999 for three months, then from €1,249 a month) depend on the configuration; both are aimed at a different size of business than a 100-minute bundle is.

What the price per call does not show belongs in the second column of your comparison: parallel calls, phone number, notice period, appointment booking. Our bundles include several parallel calls and your existing number via call forwarding, there is no setup fee on any plan, and you cancel monthly. The conditions for minutes beyond the bundle are on the Priovox pricing page, the differences to individual providers on our comparison pages.

Does an AI phone assistant pay off against an answering service or office staff?

A human answering service bills by the same pattern, only at a higher rate per minute. starbuero.de charges no base fee but €0.59 per call and €0.59 per minute of handling time, billed to the second; handling time, per the pricing page, covers the minutes on the call plus up to 120 seconds of wrap-up, around the clock with no surcharge. With 3 minutes on the call and 1 minute of wrap-up, a call there costs €2.95.

ebuero takes a €59.90 base fee on its Einsteiger (starter) plan, €1.39 per call and €1.39 per started minute of handling, all plus VAT, during core hours Monday to Friday, 7 am to 7 pm. At 3 minutes per call that is €5.56 per conversation plus the base fee. Real people sit on those phones, and they can do things an AI cannot; this calculation compares only the price of being reachable.

At 33 calls a month, starbuero.de costs €97.35 and our Solo plan €99: level. At 166 calls it is €489.70 against €299 on the Team plan; in this calculation the switch pays off from around 102 calls a month (299 ÷ 2.95). Against ebuero Einsteiger the threshold sits at around 43 calls, because of the base fee and the per-minute price.

A part-time employee on 20 hours a week costs, at the German statutory minimum wage (Mindestlohn) of €13.90 an hour (since 1 January 2026, €14.60 from 2027, per the customs authority), around €1,205 gross a month (20 × 52 ÷ 12 = 86.7 hours). Add the employer’s share of social insurance, around 21% in 2026 (contribution rates: 9.3% pension, 1.3% unemployment, 7.3% plus 1.45% health, 1.8% long-term care, excluding levies). That makes around €1,460 a month.

At 105 calls a month that is just under €14 per call, at 210 calls around €7. The comparison is only fair if the phone were the only task. It never is. An office employee writes invoices and knows customers by name, but is only at the phone for those 20 hours. What reachability outside those hours is worth is written in your order book.

Frequently asked questions

How much does an AI phone assistant cost a small business per month?

For 100 included minutes, small businesses pay €32 to €99 a month in September 2026, for 500 to 1,500 minutes about €110 to €330. Pure usage tariffs start at €0 base fee and around €0.35 per minute of conversation. Most providers quote net prices, to which 19% VAT is added.

How many calls are 100 minutes?

Roughly 33 calls if a call lasts 3 minutes on average (measured across 52 calls in real use, see above). At 2 minutes per call it is 50 calls, at 4 minutes 25. For choosing a tariff, your own timed call length is what counts.

Is billing per minute or per call cheaper?

Per call becomes cheaper from about 64 calls a month, below that per minute, assuming 3 minutes per call, €0.35 per minute and a €49 base fee plus €0.28 per call. On the per-minute tariff a call then costs a constant €1.05; in the per-call model the price per call falls with every additional conversation, because the base fee spreads out.

What does setting up an AI phone assistant cost?

Between €0 and €14,900 one-off, depending on the provider and the effort. Priovox charges no setup fee on any plan, Enterprise included; Agentino also shows €0. Standard packages cost €499 net at assistent24 and €199 to €999 net at ihretelefonzentrale.de. Individually configured setups for mid-sized firms start from €1,000 at fonio.ai and from €1,490 net at Digital Apes; KI-Beratung Deutschland lists €3,900 to €14,900 depending on the package, ihretelefonzentrale.de €4,999 for a three-month pilot. Spread over twelve months, €3,900 is about €325 a month.

Which extra costs come on top of the base fee?

Setup (€0 at Priovox and Agentino, €199 to €999 net for standard packages at ihretelefonzentrale.de and assistent24, €1,000 to €14,900 for individually configured projects), phone number (€0 to €9 a month), transfer minutes when a call is put through, extra minutes (€0.15 to €0.35), extra channels such as WhatsApp (€39 to €69 a month) and 19% VAT on net prices. Contract-term tariffs add a 12- to 24-month commitment that gets expensive when volume drops.

Is an AI phone assistant cheaper than an answering service?

From around 100 calls a month, yes, at least in the worked example above with €2.95 per call at an answering service without base fee and a 500-minute bundle for €299. At 33 calls a month both options land at around €97 to €99. An answering service with a base fee and per-minute prices above €1 becomes more expensive than the bundle from about 43 calls.

Sources

All prices were read on the providers’ pages on 29 September 2026. Prices change; the current pricing page applies. The linked pages are in German.

• voiceOne: Tarife und Preise (page dated 26 August 2026)
• Agentino: Preise
• fonio.ai: Preise
• fonio.ai: Setups
• HalloPetra: Preise
• assistent24: Preise
• Digital Apes: Preise
• ihretelefonzentrale.de: AI voicebots, packages and prices (page dated “Aktualisiert September 2026”)
• KI-Beratung Deutschland: KI-Beratung Kosten (prices as of 20 August 2026)
• Placetel AI: Preise
• smao: Pricing
• VITAS: Preise
• starbuero.de: Preise
• ebuero: Preise
• Zoll: Mindestlohn und Mindestlohngesetz
• lohn-info.de: Sozialversicherungsbeiträge 2026
• Priovox: prices, no setup fee on any plan, and measured figures on priovox.com/en/pricing/; call length from 52 calls in real use