How much does an answering service cost a restaurant?

Per-minute math punishes food orders

A call to a law office’s answering service is short. Name, number, quick message, done. A food order is not short. Someone ordering dinner for four reads the menu out loud, swaps a side, asks what comes on the chicken sandwich, changes one plate to two, and spells their street name. That call runs several minutes. At published and reported rates of roughly $2 to $5 a minute, one order call can cost $10 to $25 just to answer. Twenty of those a week blows past most of the monthly plans above.

Rounding makes it worse. One large service’s own rate card says every call rounds up to the next full minute, so a 31-second call bills as a full minute. Reviews of another report that it bills in 30-second steps and also counts the time the receptionist spends writing up your message after the call ends. AnswerFirst, the per-second one, advertises against exactly this: its example is a 65-second call that gets billed elsewhere as 90 or even 120 seconds. Some 2026 cost guides estimate rounding alone adds 15 to 20 percent to a bill. Those guides come from AI phone companies, so hold the exact number loosely. But the rounding rules themselves are printed on the services’ own pages.

AI services sell flat monthly plans

AI answering services mostly publish one flat monthly price instead of a minute bucket. Among restaurant-focused options, Slang.ai publishes plans starting at $399 per location per month, and ’starting at’ means the real quote can be higher.

The cleanest comparison in the whole market comes from Abby Connect, which sells both models side by side. Its published AI plans run $99 a month for 50 minutes to $690 for 500, roughly half the price of its own human plans at the same minute counts. Same company, same minutes, about double for humans.

Still read the fine print. One restaurant AI service advertises no per-minute fees, yet its own blog from earlier this year listed a per-minute charge after 500 minutes, and today its pricing page just says to contact them. As of this writing, a growing number of AI services hide prices behind a sales call, too. Always ask what happens after your included minutes run out.

The costs that never make the pricing page

Whichever model you pick, the sticker is rarely the whole bill. One answering service’s own blog warns owners about several of these, so this is the industry describing itself. Another published price page notes plainly that prices don’t include taxes and fees.

Before you sign anything, ask about each of these by name.

• Setup fees. Published and reported fees run from about $75 to several hundred dollars, depending on how much connecting work your account needs.
• Overage rates. The per-minute price after your bucket empties is usually higher than the in-plan rate, and it hits in your busiest month. One outside review described a typical $450 month at a large service jumping to $1,200 during a spike.
• 28-day billing cycles. Thirteen invoices a year instead of twelve. That’s an extra month of cost hiding in the calendar.
• Holiday and after-hours surcharges. Some services are reported to charge 1.5 to 2 times the normal rate on nights and holidays, exactly when your phone is busiest. Others advertise none. Ask directly.
• Junk calls. Most human services bill answered calls whether or not they’re customers, robocalls and wrong numbers included. Ask whether junk calls count against your minutes.
• Small add-ons. Published examples include bilingual answering for about $20 a month, a fee for each extra call script, and line items for message storage and call recording.

A message about an order is still a missed order

Here is the part no pricing page says. Traditional answering services take messages. The receptionist is friendly and professional, but they don’t have your menu, and they can’t put food on your kitchen’s board. So Friday at 6:35, when someone calls for two chicken shawarma plates and a falafel wrap with no onions, the receptionist writes down a name and a number and promises a call back.

By the time anyone at your counter sees that message, the caller has ordered from whoever answered and took the order. You paid several dollars for that call, and the order still went to a competitor. For a dentist or a plumber, a message is the product, and these services deliver it well. A restaurant’s calls are orders. A message about an order is a missed order with a receipt attached.

Compare cost per answered order, not cost per month

So don’t shop on the monthly price. Shop on what the money actually buys: completed orders. Ask every service, human or AI, the same four questions.

Then divide the true monthly cost by the number of calls that end as complete orders in your kitchen. A $300 plan that turns orders into call-back notes can cost far more per order than a $600 plan that actually takes the order, because the first one barely captures any.

That last question is what OrderVoice is built around. It answers instantly, takes the whole order with changes and reads it back, answers menu and hours questions, and brings one of your own staff onto the line for judgment calls like allergies or big catering orders. Pricing depends on your call volume, so any number printed here would be made up. The demo ends with the exact price for your restaurant.

• What is my full monthly cost at my real call volume, in writing, with overage, fees, and taxes included?
• Do calls round up, and by how much?
• What would my busiest month cost, not my average one?
• Do you take the order, or take a message?