What determines the price of an AI receptionist?
The dollar figure moves based on a handful of concrete variables, not the vendor's mood. Before you get a quote, it helps to know what you're actually being priced on:
- Call volume and concurrency. How many calls the line needs to handle at once, and whether it needs to scale during marketing pushes or after a mass-tort ad airs.
- Intake script complexity. A simple "take a message" flow is cheap. A flow that qualifies case type, timeline, liability, and prior representation before booking a consult costs more to build and test.
- Languages. Adding Spanish or Russian alongside English means more prompt engineering and more testing per language.
- Integrations. Whether the AI needs to write directly into your CRM (Clio, Filevine, or similar), sync your live calendar, and trigger SMS follow-up, or just forward a summary email.
- Escalation logic. Warm-transfer to a live paralegal, voicemail fallback, or an internal Slack/SMS alert for hot leads, each path adds build time.
- Hosting model. Shared infrastructure is cheaper than a dedicated, isolated environment for your firm's data.
What's included in the setup fee vs. the monthly fee?
The setup fee covers the one-time work: designing the qualification script, building the call flow on our AI voice agent stack, wiring up your calendar and CRM, and testing it against real call scenarios before it goes live. The monthly fee covers what keeps it running correctly: hosting, uptime monitoring, prompt tuning as your intake criteria change, and the phone line itself. There's no per-minute overage on top: the monthly rate is flat.
One Process vs. Connected Systems vs. Full Build: which fits a law firm intake line?
Most law firm intake lines land in one of three pricing tiers, depending on how much of the above list applies to you:
| Tier | Price | Fits a law firm when |
|---|---|---|
| One Process | $2,500-6,000 | You need one clean intake flow: answer, ask a few qualifying questions, book or route the call. |
| Connected Systems | $6,000-15,000 | You need CRM sync, multi-step qualification, and follow-up automation layered on top of the phone line. |
| Full Build | from $15,000 | You want a fully custom build across phone, web chat, and internal workflows, with dedicated infrastructure. |
| Care | $300-500/mo | Ongoing hosting, monitoring, fixes, and updates for whichever tier you build on. |
| Active | $750-1,500/mo | Ongoing work, new workflows, and DevOps layered onto the build over time. |
| Consulting | $150-200/hr | You already have a system and need targeted scoping or script changes. |
A solo or small PI practice with a single, well-defined intake script usually starts at One Process and grows into Connected Systems once CRM integration and multi-step qualification become worth the investment. Larger firms running broader automation across intake, document generation, and case management usually land in Full Build from the start.
How is FirstReply priced specifically for personal injury intake?
FirstReply is our own product built specifically for personal injury law firm intake, so it skips the custom-build price entirely. Its Legal Intake plan is $500 one-time setup plus $749/month flat; the standard FirstReply plan runs $549/month. Founding clients get $0 setup with a 6-month contract. It answers every intake call 24/7, qualifies the caller, sends SMS follow-up within 60 seconds, speaks English, Spanish, and Russian, and books consultations straight into your calendar. It also comes with a stated guarantee: 2 retained cases in the first 60 days that would otherwise have gone to voicemail, or you don't pay for setup.
Is an AI receptionist cheaper than a full-time receptionist or a live answering service?
The honest comparison isn't a single number, it's the shape of the cost. A full-time, in-house receptionist is a W-2 salary plus benefits and turnover risk, and they can only answer one call at a time during business hours. A live answering service is usually billed per minute or per call, so the bill moves with your call volume, which can be unpredictable right when you need it most (after an ad campaign, during a mass-tort surge, or overnight after an accident). An AI receptionist replaces both variables with a flat setup fee and a flat monthly rate: it answers every call, at any hour, without adding a line item every time the phone rings more than usual.
What's the typical payback period?
Most AI receptionist deployments we run pay for themselves within 30 to 60 days. That math is easiest to see in personal injury, where a single missed call can represent a $15,000 to $20,000 case lost to whichever firm answered first. Once even one call that would have gone to voicemail turns into a retained client, the monthly cost is already justified for the rest of the relationship.