Phone answering in New Zealand runs from about NZ$19 a month for message-taking, NZ$149 for a virtual receptionist with a small call allowance, and near NZ$2,990 to roster a person on the dinner peak. Skai Solutions is NZ$325 a month and is the only one of those that can complete a takeaway order.
It is 6.10pm on a Friday at a fish and chip shop in Petone. Three orders are in the fryer, one caller is on hold, and the phone rings again. Nobody picks it up, because there is nobody left to pick it up. Somewhere in that hour, paying someone else to answer the phone stops being a nice thought and becomes a line item.
The short answer on price. In New Zealand in 2026, message-taking plans start around NZ$19 a month plus a fee for every call. Virtual receptionist plans with call transfers publish from about NZ$149 a month for a small call allowance. Flat-rate AI answering runs roughly NZ$129 to NZ$649 a month depending on minutes and what the agent is asked to do. Putting a real person on the phone for the dinner peak alone works out near NZ$3,000 a month. All of those are quoted excluding GST, which in New Zealand adds 15%.
Prices below are the published rates advertised in the New Zealand market as at August 2026, quoted excluding GST. Ranges are used where providers publish different tiers.
| Option | Typical published price in NZ | What you get | Can it complete a takeaway order? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Message-taking Basic answering plans | from about NZ$19/mo, plus a fee for every call | Caller's name and number sent to you by email or text | No |
| Virtual receptionist Live answering with transfers | from about NZ$149/mo for a 50-call allowance | Messages plus live transfer to your team, custom greeting | No |
| General AI receptionist Not hospitality-specific | roughly NZ$129 to NZ$199/mo for a couple of hundred minutes | Answers, books into a calendar, texts you urgent calls | Not into a POS |
| A person on the phone Dinner peak only, calculated below | about NZ$2,990/mo | A human being, on one call at a time | Yes |
| Hospitality AI Skai Solutions Minimum Package | NZ$325/mo, 500 minutes, plus NZ$545 one-off setup | Orders into the POS, bookings, several callers at once, transfers to staff | Yes |
Published prices as advertised by New Zealand providers in each category as at August 2026, quoted by category rather than by company. Skai Solutions figures are our own, and are on our New Zealand pricing page in full. All excluding GST.
Read past the headline and most New Zealand answering services bill per call or per minute on top of a retainer. That model was built for a plumber taking forty calls a month, and it works there.
A busy takeaway is not taking forty calls a month. NZ$149 for a 50-call allowance is an effective NZ$2.98 a call. A venue doing 300 inbound calls a month at that rate lands near NZ$890 a month, and it climbs in December when your wage bill and food cost are already climbing. That is Skai Solutions' own extrapolation from an advertised category rate rather than a quote from any provider, and larger bands will be cheaper per call. The direction of travel is the point: on per-call billing, a good trading month is an expensive one.
Assume you cover the phone properly through the dinner peak: 5pm to 9pm, seven nights. That is 28 hours a week, or about 121 hours a month.
Wage rate from the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment: the adult minimum wage rises to NZ$23.95 an hour on 1 April 2026. Hours and total are Skai's calculation, shown so you can change the inputs.
Almost nobody buys those hours separately, and that is the honest version of this comparison. In practice the phone is answered by someone already on the roster doing three other things. The cost is real, it just shows up as a slower pass and a shorter fuse rather than a line on a payslip. It is also getting harder to buy: hospitality employment hit a record 146,300 in 2024, and the Restaurant Association reports a shortage of skilled kitchen and senior front of house staff driving wage inflation.
Employment and staffing figures reported by RNZ, citing the Restaurant Association of New Zealand's annual report, which also recorded record annual sales of NZ$16 billion on 1.4% growth, with margins squeezed by cost increases.
Look at who New Zealand's answering services say they are for. lists real estate, healthcare, legal, financial services and trades. lists plumbers, electricians, builders, HVAC, mechanics, landscapers, barbers, gyms and accountants. Between them that is more than twenty industry pages and almost none of them are a restaurant, a cafe or a takeaway.
That is a product decision, not an oversight, and it shows up in the pricing model. Those businesses get a call, take a message, and ring back within the hour. Nobody loses a job because the callback took forty minutes.
A venue's phone carries transactions. A message reading "Sarah rang about a large pizza order" is not a lead, it is a record of revenue that went to the shop down the road while Sarah waited. If your phone carries orders and bookings rather than enquiries, what you need to price is order completion - a different product from anything in the first three rows above.
If your cafe takes ten calls a week and eight are "what time do you close" or a supplier chasing an invoice, a NZ$19 message-taking plan will serve you fine. So will decent voicemail. Do not let anyone talk you into a NZ$325 monthly cost to solve a NZ$19 problem - including us.
The switch happens when the phone carries money: takeaway orders, bookings you cannot drop, function enquiries worth hundreds each.
If you are not yet sure which of these products you are being sold, what a telephone answering service is lays out the three kinds side by side, including the one that queues on a Friday and the one that does not.
Bring your call volume to a 30 minute demo and we will work through what the unanswered calls are costing, workings shown. If it does not stack up for your venue, we will tell you.
Book a Free DemoOn the fourth question: Skai connects to Kounta/Lightspeed, Square, Impos, H&L POS, Tevalis, Revel, TouchBistro and Oracle MICROS. Ask any provider to name your specific system rather than saying "most POS systems".
Message-taking plans publish from about NZ$19 a month plus a per-call fee. Virtual receptionist plans with transfers publish from around NZ$149 a month for a small call allowance. Flat-rate AI answering runs roughly NZ$129 to NZ$649 a month depending on included minutes. All are quoted excluding GST, which adds 15% in New Zealand.
Flat rate, in most cases. Per-call billing was designed for businesses taking a few dozen calls a month, and a busy takeaway can take that many on a Friday night. On per-call pricing your answering bill rises in exactly the months your food and wage costs are also rising.
Substantially, if you are comparing like for like. Covering the 5pm to 9pm peak seven nights a week at the 2026 adult minimum wage of NZ$23.95 an hour, plus the 3% minimum KiwiSaver employer contribution, comes to about NZ$2,990 a month before ACC levies or holiday pay. Flat-rate AI plans sit between NZ$129 and NZ$649. The honest caveat is that a person also greets guests, runs the floor and handles what software cannot.
Human services generally do, because somebody has to be awake. AI services generally do not, since the cost is the same at 2am as at 2pm. If a meaningful share of your calls arrive after close, that difference compounds quickly across a year.
Usually not in any useful sense. Most virtual receptionist plans take a message and pass it to you, which for a food order means the customer waits for a callback or orders elsewhere. Taking an order means holding your full menu including modifiers and sold-out items and writing it into the POS, which is a different product with different pricing.
No. You keep your existing number and divert calls to the service. That applies to human answering services and AI agents alike, and it is worth confirming that your existing 0800 or landline number carries across before you commit.
More: Skai's New Zealand pricing in full · the best AI phone agents for New Zealand restaurants, compared · which POS systems Skai connects to · AI phone answering for Auckland venues.