It's twenty past nine, the second bay's got an old F-150 up on the lift with a rear main seal that's been weeping onto the shop floor, your service writer is three deep at the counter working two comebacks and a parts guy on hold, and the phone starts ringing over the impact wrench. Whoever answers it decides whether that repair order becomes yours — or becomes the shop's down the street.
Before I get into the actual math: I sell one of the things in this post, and it is not something you can point your shop's phone line at today. There's no auto-repair version of it live anywhere. What's actually shipped only answers for a plumbing line right now, and I'll get specific about that, and why, before you get anywhere near a price. What follows still applies to your shop, because the arithmetic underneath these pricing pages doesn't care what trade you're in.
The honest number, so you have it before you read another word: roughly $60 to $473 a month at a normal month's call volume, $164 to $2,530 on a busy one, and which end of that you land on depends almost entirely on which billing shape you pick, barely at all on how good any given vendor's receptionist actually is on the phone. Here's how I got there.
What each of these actually charges you
I priced four real vendors, checked directly against their own pricing pages as of August 16, 2026, with every Smith.ai figure re-checked on August 19 (pricing pages change; re-check them yourself if you're reading this later). Every figure below is the vendor's own published number. That's five price sheets rather than four, because Smith.ai sells two different products at two very different prices, and which one you're being quoted matters more than anything else on this page.
Smith.ai's AI receptionist: bills by the call. Free $0/mo including 25 real calls, then $3.00 a call. Pro $150 for 75 calls, then $2.50. Enterprise $500 for 300, then $2.17. (Each paid plan has bigger rungs that cut the rate a little further; these are the base ones.)
Smith.ai's live-staffed plans, where a person answers: also by the call, several times the price. Starter $300/mo for 30 calls, then $11.50 a call. Basic $810 for 90, then $10.50. Pro $2,100 for 300, then $8.50.
PATLive: bills by the minute, live humans. Basic $75/mo, "Pay as you go", no minutes included, $2.60 a minute. Starter $250 for 75 minutes, then $2.35. Standard $460 for 200, then $2.20. Premium $720 for 350, then $2.10. Pro $1,170 for 600, then $2.00.
Dialzara: bills by the minute, AI. Business Lite $29/mo for 60 minutes, then $0.48 a minute. Business Pro $99 for 220, then $0.45. Business Plus $199 for 500, then $0.40. Business Elite $349 for 1,000, then $0.35.
GoodCall: bills by the unique customer. Starter $79/mo per agent for 100 customers, then $0.50 a customer. Growth $129 per agent for 250. Scale $249 per agent for 500. Same $0.50 past every threshold, and no charge at all for call count or minutes.
Smith.ai bills by the call, full stop, on its AI plans and its human ones alike — the unit is the same, the rate is roughly four times apart. PATLive bills by the minute with a human answering. Dialzara bills by the minute too, same shape, an AI instead of a person. GoodCall is the odd one out: no per-call or per-minute charge at all, its own page says so directly, and the only meter it has is unique customers past a monthly threshold. Its prices are quoted per agent, so every GoodCall figure I run below assumes a shop on one.
The rule I'm using below: at each volume I priced every published tier a vendor has and kept whichever one produced the cheapest total for that month, overage included. Not overage avoided. Eight of the ten numbers you're about to read do run into overage, and in several cases where a bigger tier existed, paying the overage still beat buying it. It cuts the other way too, which is the part that gets shops: shop on the sticker price alone and PATLive's $250 tier is a $497 month at the volume below.
Do the math at a normal month
Say your shop fields 45 calls a month that would've gone to a receptionist: check-engine lights, a quote request, somebody asking if you do state inspections. Two assumptions of mine are doing work here, and I'd rather flag both than bury them. First, to turn Smith.ai's call count into the other three vendors' minutes I need a minutes-per-call figure, so I'm using 4 minutes. That's mine, not a sourced figure. Second, I'm counting 45 calls as 45 unique customers for GoodCall's meter, which is also mine and is deliberately unkind to GoodCall: repeat callers and comebacks mean your real unique-customer count is lower than your call count, so GoodCall's true bill sits at or below every GoodCall number here. Adjust either one; the method doesn't change.
At 45 calls (180 minutes): Smith.ai's AI receptionist on the free tier covers 25 calls at no charge, then bills 20 more at $3.00 each: $60, and that beats its own $150 Pro plan at this volume. On Smith.ai's live-staffed side the same 45 calls run through the Starter tier — 30 calls flat, then 15 more at $11.50 each: $300 plus $172.50, $472.50, or roughly eight times the AI number for the same month. PATLive's Standard tier, 200 minutes for $460, covers the whole month with room to spare and no overage at all: flat $460. Dialzara's Business Lite tier, $29 for 60 minutes plus 120 overage minutes at $0.48, comes to $86.60, cheaper than its own Business Pro tier's $99 flat despite Pro having more included minutes. GoodCall, at 45 unique customers against its Starter tier's 100-customer threshold, never touches its meter: flat $79.
Now the thing that flat 4-minute average is hiding, and it's specific to this trade. A repair shop's phone day is unusually lopsided. A large share of your calls are twenty-second and forty-second calls that will never be a repair order: is my car ready, did the axle come in, is that noise still covered from the job you did in June. A plumber doesn't field those. Nobody calls back to check on a water heater that's already in the wall. Then at the far end sits the genuine check-engine intake, getting the vehicle, the symptom, when it started, whether they're still driving it, and that easily runs eight to ten minutes. Very little of an auto-repair phone day sits in the middle.
That lopsidedness is worth money because the two billing shapes bet on opposite mixes. Smith.ai charges the same per call either way — $3.00 on the AI free tier, $11.50 on live-staffed Starter — whether it's the parts-status call or the ten-minute intake. PATLive and Dialzara charge roughly ten times more for the second than the first, which taxes exactly the calls most likely to become your biggest repair order of the month.
And it changes which row of the table you should be reading. My flat 4 minutes splits the difference and hides that bet. Push the mix short enough and those same 45 calls make PATLive's $250 Starter tier cheaper than the $460 Standard tier I used above. Push it long enough and Dialzara's Business Pro tier beats the Business Lite stack I used above. I ran the flat average because I have no sourced call-mix for this trade and I'm not going to invent one, but if you measure one thing before you shop, measure that.
Same math, the first hard freeze
Now the first real freeze of the season. Batteries that cranked fine all November don't crank at all at six in the morning, the ones that do start throw codes they'd been quietly sitting on since fall, and half your morning is people asking whether you can look at it today. Say that pushes you to 320 calls (1,280 minutes).
Smith.ai's AI receptionist moves onto its Enterprise plan here, 300 calls for $500 plus 20 more at $2.17: $543.40 — its Pro plan would be $762.50 at this volume and the free tier $885, so Enterprise is the one to buy. Smith.ai's live-staffed Pro tier, 300 calls for $2,100, needs 20 more at $8.50: $2,270. PATLive's Pro tier, 600 minutes for $1,170, absorbs 680 overage minutes at $2.00 each: $2,530. Dialzara's Business Elite tier, 1,000 minutes for $349, absorbs 280 overage minutes at $0.35: $447. GoodCall's Growth tier, $129 for 250 customers, covers 70 more at $0.50 each: $164.
I went into this expecting the per-call vendors to look worst and the per-minute vendors to look better by comparison, and the table doesn't back that up. Four of the five moved by roughly the same multiple regardless of billing unit, human or software: 4.8x for Smith.ai's live-staffed plans, 5.5x for PATLive, 5.2x for Dialzara. Smith.ai's AI plans moved most of anything here, 9.1x, and that's an artifact worth naming rather than a warning: they moved that far because the normal month started at $60 rather than at several hundred, and $543.40 is still the third-cheapest busy month on the page, behind only GoodCall and Dialzara. A big multiple on a small base is not the same problem as a big multiple on a large one.
GoodCall moved the least by a wide margin, $79 to $164, about 2x. It is worth being precise about why, because the easy explanation is wrong. GoodCall does charge a running per-unit rate past its threshold, and the busy month above pays it on 70 customers. What's different is the unit and the size of it. One unique customer counts once no matter whether that person sat on the phone for a ten-minute diagnostic intake or called back three times chasing the same repair order, so the exact traffic a freeze week generates is the traffic its meter is least sensitive to. And $0.50 a customer, set against $2.17 to $11.50 a call or $2.00 to $2.60 a minute, is small enough that a lot of it still doesn't add up to much. Dialzara is the fair test of that, not the easy one: at $0.35 to $0.48 a minute its rate is the closest to GoodCall's on this page, and it still moves more, because a minute is a finer unit to be charged by than a customer. So the lesson isn't per-call versus per-minute. It's how coarse the billing unit is and how much one of them costs.
If a bill that barely notices your busiest week is what you're after, GoodCall's structure is the closest thing on this list to one you can sign up for today.
What actually flat looks like, and why I can't sell it to you here
None of the four vendors above is flat. The plan I sell is: $199 a month, unlimited calls, no per-minute or per-call or per-customer meter of any kind, not even a threshold like GoodCall's. And I cannot sell it to you — there's no auto-repair line for it. Two profiles exist in the actual code today, plumbing and one legacy pizza line, and auto-repair isn't either of them. I'm not going to write around that with hedged future language to make the pitch land. It just isn't there yet.
So take the practical version instead. Whichever of these four you can actually sign up for today, price it on your busiest month before you price it on your average one. The number sitting on a vendor homepage is a slow-week number, and a slow week is not when your phone problem shows up.
What the missed call is actually worth here
None of the above matters if your shop barely misses calls. So here's the other half of the arithmetic: what's on the other end of the ones you do miss. I'd rather anchor that on your door rate than on some industry-average "value of a lead," because a door rate is a number you can check against your own invoices in about a minute.
A two-hour diagnosis-and-repair, the kind that starts with a check-engine light and ends with a sensor swap, bills about $264 in labor at the U.S. average shop rate. Tekmetric's Shop Index, pulled from more than 10,000 shops across North America and dated June 30, 2026, puts that national average at $132 an hour. If your shop's in Maryland, the same rate is $141 and the same two-hour job is $282. In Virginia it's $136 and $272. Both above the national number. Swap in your own shop's actual door rate; the point holds regardless of which one you use.
Be clear about what that $264 is, though: it's labor billed, gross. Your tech's hours come out of it, and parts and their margin sit on top of the whole ticket. It is not $264 of profit, and I don't want you doing this math as if it were.
Even at gross, the comparison is lopsided. Two or three of those repair orders walking to the shop down the street is more billed labor than any of the normal-month numbers above cost you for a whole month. The same couple of jobs still outruns GoodCall's and Dialzara's busy-month bills, $164 and $447, and Smith.ai's AI-tier $543.40 as well. Smith.ai's live-staffed $2,270 and PATLive's $2,530 are the ones that need a lot more than two or three saved calls behind them, which is exactly why the billing shape matters more at high volume than the sticker price does.
Run your own numbers before you pick anything
Every figure above rides on 45 calls and 320. Yours are not those, and I would rather you ran your own week than borrowed mine. The same arithmetic is set up here, with your call count and your average ticket standing in for my assumptions. It's arithmetic on numbers you supplied, which makes it exactly as good as your guess about them. Still better than shopping off a homepage.
What each of these actually is as a product, once you get past the rate card (a live-human plan, a budget AI app, a flat-rate AI) — that's the answering service for auto repair shop breakdown. And for whenever auto-repair actually exists as a line: the shop page.
How I'd pick, if it were my shop
Count what the phone did in your two heaviest weeks of last winter, from the real log if your system keeps one and from a hard-eyed guess if it doesn't. Then count a dead week in April the same way. The gap between those two numbers is the only thing I'd shop on.
A shop whose phone rings about the same every week can pick almost anything on this page and be fine. A shop with a real winter, which is most of them, is signing up for a bill that gets expensive on precisely the weeks the bays are full and the money is good. That's a strange arrangement to enter without seeing it on paper first, and the paper takes ten minutes.
Mine isn't one of your options for this trade yet. That's a lousy sentence to end a pricing post on. It's also the only accurate one I've got.
Built for auto repair shops
The customer with the check-engine light calls three shops and books with whoever picks up. This answers and gets the vehicle, the symptom, and how soon they need it down on the call — while you stay under the car.
Catch the next repair order — from under the lift →