A virtual receptionist in Australia typically costs from about A$130 a month for a small call allowance, rising steeply with volume because most plans bill per call. Skai Solutions is a flat A$299 a month. Which is cheaper depends entirely on how many calls your venue actually takes.
A human one. This page prices message-taking and answering services staffed by people, the kind that bill per call or per minute. That is a different product with a different price shape to an AI phone agent, and the two get confused constantly because the marketing language overlaps.
If what you are actually pricing is software rather than a person, you want AI receptionist cost in Australia and New Zealand, which has the published plan prices, the four pricing models and the setup fees. Everything below is about the human option and what it does to your bill as call volume rises.
Australian virtual receptionist pricing splits into three tiers that are genuinely different products, not just different price points.
| Type | Typical AUD / month | What you're paying for | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human answering service | $100-$400+, usually per-call or per-minute on top of a base | A real person taking messages, in business hours. Overflow charges are where the bill grows. | Low call volume where a message is enough |
| Generic AI receptionist | $89-$299 | An AI answering and taking messages or booking. Usually sold horizontally to trades, clinics and salons. | Businesses whose calls are mostly enquiries |
| Hospitality-specific AI phone agent | $99-$599 | Takes actual orders into your POS, handles bookings and menu questions, handles simultaneous calls. | Venues where the phone carries revenue, not just messages |
Every price on this page is only meaningful next to the thing it replaces, and that number is published, so here it is. Under the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119, taking reservations and greeting and seating guests is a food and beverage attendant grade 2 duty, which is Level 2. From the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026 that is A$1,029.10 a week full time, or A$53,513.20 a year.
Add superannuation. The ATO super guarantee rate is 12.00% for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027, so the full time cost is about A$59,934.78 a year, roughly A$4,995 a month, before a minute of training, leave cover or a payroll line.
That is the real denominator. A virtual receptionist plan at A$130 to A$400 a month is 2.6% to 8% of one full time person. Nobody is choosing between those two things directly, because nobody hires a full timer to answer a restaurant phone. The point of putting them side by side is that it shows why the comparison operators actually make, plan price against the forty minutes a day somebody already spends on the handset, is the honest one. At the casual Level 2 rate of A$33.85 an hour, forty minutes a day across seven days trading is about A$687 a month.
One 2026 change worth knowing if you are modelling the staffed option: Payday Super started on 1 July 2026, so super is now paid on each payday rather than quarterly, and it is calculated on qualifying earnings. It does not change the annual number. It changes when it leaves the account, which for a venue running tight weeks is not nothing.
Here is the difference that no plan comparison table shows, and it is the strongest argument on this page. A subscription costs the same on a Tuesday lunch and on Anzac Day. A person does not.
| Same 40 minutes on the phone, casual Level 2 | Cost of the labour |
|---|---|
| Monday to Friday, 6am to 10pm | A$22.57 |
| Saturday | A$27.08 |
| Sunday | A$27.08 |
| Public holiday | A$45.13 |
Worked from the award's own casual penalty column at 125%, 150%, 150% and 250% of the A$27.08 Level 2 minimum hourly rate. A public holiday costs exactly double a weekday for the same forty minutes, and it lands on the day the phone rings hardest, which is set out on our page about the public holiday surcharge.
Note the middle two rows. On the restaurant award a casual at Level 1 or Level 2 is on 150% for a Sunday, the same as Saturday, while the same person in a hotel dining room is on 175%. If you are not sure which of those applies to you, our page on which award covers your restaurant is the coverage test.
A message-taking service - human or AI - hands you a list of people to ring back. For a plumber that works: the job is still there in an hour. For a restaurant at 6:40pm on a Friday it does not, because the caller wanted food in twenty minutes and has already ordered somewhere else. You paid to be told about revenue you'd already lost.
The question that actually decides your cost is whether your phone carries transactions or messages. If it carries transactions, a message-taking service at $89 is not cheaper than an ordering agent at $299 - it's a different product that doesn't solve your problem.
If the category itself is still fuzzy, what a telephone answering service is separates message taking, virtual reception and software, and is blunt about who should not buy any of them. If the quote in front of you also includes new handsets or a new plan, price that separately using what a restaurant phone system costs in Australia.
Compare any monthly fee against contribution, not against turnover, and use a published band rather than a vendor's model. The ATO small business benchmarks, drawn from 2023-24 tax returns and updated in March 2026, put cost of sales at 34% to 42% of turnover for cafes in the A$65,000 to A$250,000 band, averaging 38%. For restaurants in the A$65,000 to A$500,000 band the average is 35%.
That means a lost sale costs you roughly 62 cents in the dollar in a cafe and 65 cents in a restaurant, because the food was never bought. On a A$130 monthly plan, a cafe with a A$25 average order needs to save about nine calls a month to break even, and a restaurant losing A$90 bookings needs about three. Those are honest thresholds and some venues will not clear them, which is the point of working it out first.
Between about A$130 and A$300 a month for most small venues, and the spread has almost nothing to do with quality. It is decided by the billing shape: a plan sold on a call allowance looks cheap until the allowance runs out, and the overage rate is where a A$130 plan becomes a A$400 month. A flat fee cannot do that, which is why Skai Solutions is a flat A$299 a month regardless of volume. Before you compare one headline price against another, these are the questions that decide which number you actually pay.
The comparison almost nobody does, and the only one that settles the argument, is the cost of the call you already answer yourself. An outsourced plan is priced per call. Your own staff are priced per hour. Until you convert one into the other you are comparing nothing.
Take the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119. A Level 2 employee is on A$27.08 an hour ordinary time and A$33.85 an hour as a casual. Add the 12 per cent superannuation guarantee and the all in cost of an hour is A$30.33 and A$37.91. Now divide by the calls that hour actually absorbs.
| Calls handled in the hour | Cost per call, Level 2 permanent | Cost per call, Level 2 casual |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | A$7.58 | A$9.48 |
| 8 | A$3.79 | A$4.74 |
| 12 | A$2.53 | A$3.16 |
| 20 | A$1.52 | A$1.90 |
This is Skai Solutions' arithmetic on the published award rates and the superannuation guarantee, not a market survey, so put your own wage level into it. The structural point holds either way: in house call handling is cheap at high volume and expensive at low volume, and outsourced per call pricing is the exact opposite. A venue taking four calls an hour is paying between A$7.58 and A$9.48 a call to answer them itself, which is well above any per call rate on the market. A venue taking twenty is paying A$1.52 to A$1.90, which almost nothing beats.
Two things the table does not capture, and both push the in house number up rather than down. The hour is not free at the margin, because the person answering was doing something else, so the true cost includes the table that waited. And the calls that ring out during the rush cost the full value of the booking, not a fraction of an hour. Our page on sales per labour hour puts a figure on the first, and how long a restaurant phone should ring covers the second.
If you are still working out which kind of product you need, the AI receptionist guide covers what the category actually includes, what each tier costs, and who should not buy one.
Cost is the second question. The first is what you are actually buying, which is covered in how a virtual receptionist works: the divert, who is on the other end, and the four venue situations where the model breaks down.
If the option you are actually pricing is an AI agent rather than a human service, AI receptionist cost in Australia and New Zealand prices that side of it, including the per minute and per call models that make headline comparisons misleading.
Before you compare anyone's pricing, bring your call volume to a 30 minute demo. We will show the workings, and if what you are losing is less than the monthly fee we will say so.
Book a Free DemoBecause the headline number buys one thing and a venue needs four. Read any Australian provider's public pricing page and the entry plan is the answering, with everything that makes it work sold beside it. Prices below are category rates read on 4 October 2026 from one Australian provider's published pricing, stated excluding GST, and we do not name companies on this site.
| Line | Advertised, per month ex GST |
|---|---|
| Message taking, entry plan | from A$25 |
| Messages plus call transfers | from A$33 |
| Plan with 15 included calls | A$39 |
| Lead capture, or appointment booking | from A$49 each |
| Call diversion | A$20 |
| A phone number | A$5 |
| IVR | A$10 |
| Voicemail to email | A$5 |
Now add the ones a restaurant cannot do without. Diversion, so the calls actually arrive. A number. An IVR, because you want the supplier calls separated from the bookings. Voicemail to email for the overflow. That is A$25 plus A$20 plus A$5 plus A$10 plus A$5, which is A$65 a month ex GST, 2.6 times the advertised entry price, before a single call has been answered. That is our arithmetic from the rates above, not a claim anybody makes about their own plan, and it is the single most useful thing to check before you compare two quotes.
Then look again at the 15 call plan. A$39 for 15 included calls is A$2.60 per included call before any overage. A quiet suburban cafe might ring 15 times in a week. A booked restaurant rings 15 times in a Saturday lunch, so that plan is spent by the second day of the month and everything after it bills at the overage rate.
This is the comparison the per minute plans are built to stop you making, and the inputs are both public. A Level 2 food and beverage attendant on the Restaurant Industry Award is on A$27.08 an hour ordinary from 1 July 2026, the rate on our award rates page. That is A$0.45 a minute. A three minute booking call therefore costs about A$1.35 in wages to take yourself, against A$2.60 for one included call on the 15 call plan above. Our arithmetic, inputs shown.
So on a pure per minute basis the in house hand wins, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling something. The plan does not win on the minute. It wins or loses on the other 55 minutes of the hour, when nobody rings and you are paying that person anyway, and on the minutes during service when the person exists but has four plates in their hands. That is the honest frame for every one of these quotes.
Which gives you three questions to put to any provider, and the billing increment is the one almost nobody asks. Is the plan billed per call, per minute or per message? If per minute, is it rounded to the second, to 30 seconds or up to the whole minute, because a venue whose calls average 90 seconds pays for two minutes every time under whole minute rounding. And what happens on the call where somebody rings to ask your opening hours, which is the most common call a restaurant gets and the least valuable.
If your phone mostly carries enquiries like that, a basic message taking plan at the entry rate above is the right buy and it is not us. If it carries bookings during service, the thing to compare is not the price per call at all but the bookings that currently go unanswered, and what an AI receptionist for a restaurant actually does sets out how that is counted.
How much does a business answering service cost per month?
Most Australian plans aimed at a small venue sit between about A$130 and A$300 a month, and the figure you end up paying is set by the billing shape rather than the headline. A plan sold with a call allowance charges an overage rate once the allowance is used, so a busy month on a cheap plan can cost more than an expensive one. Ask for the overage rate and the billing increment in writing before comparing any two prices.
Human answering services typically run from around $100 to $400+ per month, usually charged per call or per minute above a base plan. Hospitality-specific AI phone agents that take orders into a POS run roughly $99 to $599 per month. Setup fees range from nothing to about $1,000.
In Australian pricing pages the two words are used interchangeably and both mean a person, offshore or onshore, answering under your business name. Where they differ is scope: an answering service usually takes a message, while a virtual receptionist plan is sold as also transferring calls, handling diary bookings and following a script you supply, and is priced higher for it. Ask what the plan actually does rather than which word it uses. The comparison only holds if the AI does the same job - a message-taking AI and an order-taking AI are different products at different prices.
The two that catch people are per-minute overage above the plan's included minutes, and setup fees. Ask for the overage rate and the setup fee in writing before signing.
Skai is quoted after a demo because pricing depends on call volume, number of venues and POS setup. There's no lock-in contract and 30 days notice to cancel. Email info@skaisolution.com if you want a figure before booking.
Prices above are indicative bands drawn from Australian vendors' publicly published pricing pages as at August 2026. Vendors change pricing frequently - check current figures directly before deciding. Skai sells hospitality-specific phone agents and this page is written by Skai.
More: Phone answering service costs compared · Skai for New Zealand venues.