Phone answering in Australia is billed three ways: per call, per minute, or a flat monthly fee. Message-taking starts around A$30 a month plus a fee per call, virtual receptionists from about A$130, and rostering a person on the dinner peak works out near A$4,000. Skai Solutions is a flat A$299.
| Model | How it bills | Predictable? | Where it hurts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per call | A base fee plus a charge for each call answered | No | Your busiest month is your most expensive month - exactly when margins are tightest |
| Per minute | A bundle of included minutes, then per-minute overage | Partly | Long calls. A complicated order or a function enquiry burns minutes fast |
| Flat monthly | One fee for a call or minute band | Yes | You pay the same in February as December - fine if you know your volume |
Per-call billing and hospitality are a bad fit, and the reason is in the retail data. Australian cafe, restaurant and takeaway turnover peaks hard in December - the index runs about 113 against an average month nationally, and about 116 in Queensland. February is the trough at roughly 87.
On per-call billing, your answering bill peaks in the same month your wage bill peaks and your kitchen is hardest pressed. On a flat plan it doesn't move.
One exception worth knowing: the Northern Territory runs inverted - August indexes around 121 while December sits near 96. If you're in Darwin, ignore the national seasonality advice entirely.
Seasonality index calculated from ABS Retail Trade, Australia, Table 11, cafes/restaurants/takeaway turnover by state, original series. The series was discontinued after June 2025 and continues in the Monthly Household Spending Indicator.
Before comparing quotes, get three numbers off your phone bill or POS:
Then ask every provider the same question: "What would my bill have been last December?" A provider who can't answer that from your volumes is quoting you a headline price, not a cost.
Every comparison above is the cost side. The other side is what an unanswered call takes off you, and there is a published Australian number for that rather than a vendor model. The ATO small business benchmarks, built from 2023-24 tax returns and updated in March 2026, put cost of sales at 32% to 39% of turnover for restaurants in the A$65,000 to A$500,000 band, averaging 35%. Cafes in the smallest band run 34% to 42%.
So a missed call does not cost you the food. You never bought it. It costs the contribution, which on those averages is roughly 65 cents in every restaurant sales dollar and 62 cents in every cafe dollar. A A$90 booking that rings out is about A$58 gone, and a A$25 cafe order about A$15.50. Put your own average spend through that and you have the only figure worth comparing any monthly fee against. The full working is at what a good food cost percentage is for a restaurant.
The cheapest tier of any answering service - human or AI - takes a message. For most trades that's the whole job. For a venue it isn't: a message about a takeaway order is a record of revenue you already lost, because the caller ordered elsewhere while waiting for a callback. If your phone carries transactions rather than enquiries, the relevant comparison is between order-taking products, not against the cheapest message-taker on the market.
Two things worth reading alongside this page. If you are not sure which product you are actually being quoted, what a telephone answering service is sets out the three kinds and what each does badly. And if you have not yet priced the line itself, what a restaurant phone system costs in Australia runs the full inputs table at August 2026 market rates, which is a separate bill from this one.
Bring your call volume to a 30 minute demo and we will work out what the unanswered calls are costing you, workings shown. If the maths does not stack up for your venue, we will tell you.
Book a Free DemoIt depends entirely on the billing model. Per-call services charge a base fee plus a per-call rate, so cost scales with volume. Per-minute services bundle minutes with overage above. Flat monthly plans price by call or minute band. For a hospitality venue with seasonal volume, flat monthly is usually cheaper across a full year even when the headline price looks higher.
Flat rate, in most cases. Australian hospitality turnover peaks around 13% above an average month in December and troughs around 13% below in February, so per-call billing spikes your answering cost in the month your costs are already highest. The Northern Territory is the exception - it peaks in August.
Human services generally do, because someone has to be awake. AI services generally don't, since the cost is the same at 2am. If a meaningful share of your calls come after close, that difference compounds quickly.
Ask what your bill would have been last December using your actual call volumes. Ask for the overage rate, the setup fee, the notice period, and whether the service takes orders into your POS or only takes messages.
If your venue is a takeaway rather than a dine-in restaurant, the buyer's guide to AI phone ordering systems for takeaways works the same numbers against order completion rather than message taking.