AI Receptionist Cost India 2026: ₹2/min

Dvaarik is self-serve SaaS today: there is no setup fee and no minimum commitment. You log in, add your services, staff, hours and knowledge, connect channels, and pay only for what your agents actually do.

Credits are prepaid and never expire; at zero balance agents pause gracefully, so there are no surprise bills. Agencies and developers can sell the same platform under their own brand through the white-label partner programme, and set their own client pricing.

Dvaarik is self-serve SaaS today: there is no setup fee and no minimum commitment. You log in, add your services, staff, hours and knowledge, connect channels, and pay only for what your agents actually do.

Credits are prepaid and never expire; at zero balance agents pause gracefully, so there are no surprise bills. Agencies and developers can sell the same platform under their own brand through the white-label partner programme, and set their own client pricing.

Dvaarik is self-serve SaaS today: there is no setup fee and no minimum commitment. You log in, add your services, staff, hours and knowledge, connect channels, and pay only for what your agents actually do.

Credits are prepaid and never expire; at zero balance agents pause gracefully, so there are no surprise bills. Agencies and developers can sell the same platform under their own brand through the white-label partner programme, and set their own client pricing.

We maintain a sourced index of every Indian voice-AI vendor's published rate — each figure read directly on that vendor's own page, with the source URL and the date it was pulled. These were last re-verified on 29 July 2026.

Three observations that are more useful than the table itself.

Two of the ten publish no price at all, and a third has withdrawn the overage rate it used to publish. If a vendor will not tell you what a minute costs before a sales call, that is information about how the deal will be priced.

Plan-based pricing hides a high effective rate at low volume. A ₹9,999/month plan bundling 500 minutes is ₹20 per minute if you use the bundle, and worse if you do not. The headline monthly number looks modest; the per-minute reality is ten times ours.

Compare effective cost, never the headline. The full index, with source links and dates for every figure, is at the India AI voice agent pricing index, and it is downloadable as JSON and CSV if you want to check our arithmetic.

We bill in whole minutes. A 40-second call bills as one minute. A 2 minute 20 second call bills as three. This is worth being blunt about because "per-second billing" gets used as a selling point, and on short calls it genuinely is cheaper.

Here is the honest size of the difference. Take a business with 200 calls a month averaging 1 minute 30 seconds of real talk time.

• Whole-minute billing: 200 calls × 2 billed minutes = 400 minutes = ₹800
• Hypothetical per-second billing at the same ₹2/min: 200 × 1.5 = 300 minutes = ₹600

So rounding costs that business ₹200 a month. We would rather show you that number than hide it. What we will not do is quote ₹2/min and then bill you at ₹2.50 or ₹3 once you are live, which is a more expensive kind of surprise and one we have seen quoted to people who then came to us.

The rounding also has an effect worth planning around: it makes very short calls proportionally expensive. If your call mix is dominated by 20-second "are you open?" enquiries, a large share of your bill is rounding. That is a good argument for putting your hours on your website and your Google listing — and an honest argument for a chat agent at ₹2 per conversation instead of voice for that traffic.

Whatever you end up buying, and from whomever, check the quote for these. Every one of them is standard somewhere in this market, and none of them tend to be in the headline number.

• GST. Almost universally quoted ex-GST in India, including by us. 18%. On a ₹10,000 load that is ₹1,800.
• Phone number rental. Separate from the software on essentially every platform. Ours is ₹1,500 per 30 days if we supply it, and ₹0 if you keep your own.
• Per-seat or per-user charges. Common on cloud telephony and IVR-derived products. A plan price for "1 user" is not the price for your team. We have none.
• Setup or onboarding fees. Published add-ons at several Indian vendors. Today Dvaarik is self-serve with no setup fee and no required plan — usage is prepaid credits, voice from ₹2/min with whole-minute billing.
• Call recording and transcripts. Frequently an add-on. Ours is ₹0.10/min on top if you want recordings; the transcript itself is not extra. The detail is here.
• Minimum monthly commitments. Some vendors set a floor — a minimum spend or a minimum minute volume — which turns a per-minute rate into a subscription in practice. We have none; top-ups start at ₹500.
• Contract minimums. At least one Indian vendor publishes a three-month minimum on plans. Ask.
• Overage rates. If you buy bundled minutes, the price of minute 501 matters more than the price of the bundle. One vendor in our index has stopped publishing theirs entirely.
• WhatsApp conversation charges. Billed by Meta, to your own account. We add no markup to it. Anyone bundling it into their own margin should be asked what the markup is.

None of this is exotic. It is just that the comparison usually happens on the headline rate, and the invoice happens on the whole list.

You do not need a quote to get within a few hundred rupees of your real number. Do this instead.

1. Open your call log for last month and count answered calls. Not attempts — answered.
2. Add the missed ones. These are the calls an AI receptionist would actually be picking up, and they are usually the reason to buy. Count separately the ones outside your working hours.
3. Estimate average talk time, then round up. Most enquiry calls in Indian small businesses run 1.5 to 4 minutes. Round each up to the next whole minute — that is what will be billed.
4. Multiply: (calls × rounded minutes) × ₹2. That is your voice cost.
5. Add ₹1,500 if you want us to supply a number, ₹0 if you are keeping yours.
6. Today Dvaarik is self-serve with no setup fee and no required plan — usage is prepaid credits, voice from ₹2/min with whole-minute billing.
7. Add 18% GST on whatever you load.

Then do the other side of the sum, which matters more: take the missed calls from step two, apply the share you would realistically have converted, and multiply by what one customer is worth to you. If a booked appointment is worth ₹800 and you are missing 30 calls a month, converting even five of them is ₹4,000 — against a voice cost in the hundreds. If a customer is worth ₹40 and you miss three calls a month, the sums do not work and you should not buy this.

That second calculation is the one that should decide it. The rate card is almost never the deciding factor; the value of a recovered enquiry is.

The subject described in this section: This comparison gets made constantly and usually badly, so here it is with the caveats attached.

A full-time receptionist in an Indian metro is a salary plus statutory costs plus the desk plus the phone plus training plus cover for leave. Whatever that number is in your city — and you know it better than we do — it is a fixed monthly commitment that covers roughly nine hours a day, six days a week, minus holidays, sick days and lunch.

Today Dvaarik is self-serve with no setup fee and no required plan — usage is prepaid credits, voice from ₹2/min with whole-minute billing.

But the honest framing is not replacement. In almost every business we have worked with, the AI receptionist does not replace the person — it replaces the *voicemail*. Your staff keep doing the work they were doing; the agent catches the calls that were previously hitting a beep at 9pm, or ringing out while both chairs were occupied. Buying it as a headcount cut usually disappoints. Buying it as a leak fix usually does not.

We have written the full comparison, including where a human clearly wins, in AI receptionist vs a human answering service and AI receptionist vs call centre costs.

In rough order of how much they actually move your invoice:

Call duration, more than call count. Doubling the number of calls doubles the voice line. Doubling the length of each call does the same thing, and length is the one you can influence. Agents that ramble cost money; a well-configured agent answers and books rather than chatting. Today Dvaarik is self-serve with no setup fee and no required plan — usage is prepaid credits, voice from ₹2/min with whole-minute billing.

Outbound campaigns. Ad leads are the sharpest case — a click-to-WhatsApp ad lead called back within a minute converts far better than one called the next morning. Inbound volume is bounded by how many people ring you. Outbound is bounded by how many numbers you load, so it is the line that can surprise you. Campaign minutes bill the same ₹2/min, but a 500-number campaign at 2 minutes each is 1,000 minutes — ₹1,500 in an afternoon. Plan campaigns as a budget, not as a background process.

Higher voice tiers. Studio HD at ₹3/min and the global tier at ₹4–5/min are real upgrades with real price differences. Most Indian businesses do not need them. If someone is putting you on a premium tier by default, ask why.

Call recording. ₹0.10/min sounds trivial and is, until you are recording every call at high volume. Worth having; worth knowing it is there.

Very short calls. Because of whole-minute rounding, a mix dominated by 20-second calls is proportionally expensive. Route that traffic to chat at ₹2 per conversation, or answer it on your website.

Nothing else. There is no per-seat charge, no per-integration charge, no charge for adding a language, and no charge for the number of people in your team using the dashboard.

We would rather lose the sale than have you unhappy in six weeks, so here are the cases where the arithmetic genuinely does not work.

You get very few calls and someone always answers. Four calls a week, all picked up, means you do not have a phone problem. Nothing on this page will help you.

Your average customer is worth very little. If a converted enquiry is worth ₹40, you need a lot of recovered calls to justify even a ₹2,800 month. The maths works on value per customer, not on volume alone.

Your calls are complex, emotional or high-stakes from the first second. Some conversations should start with a human. Legal distress, medical emergencies, serious complaints — an agent can take the details and route fast, but if that is most of your call volume, buy differently.

You need bit-for-bit identical wording every call for compliance. A recorded prompt is easier to audit than a generative system. Some compliance teams will simply require that.

You are not going to read the transcripts. The first month's value is largely in discovering what people actually ring to ask. If nobody on your side will look at that, you are buying half the product.

If two or more of those describe you, tell us and we will say so. We have talked people out of this before.

Dvaarik is self-serve SaaS today: there is no setup fee and no minimum commitment. You log in, add your services, staff, hours and knowledge, connect channels, and pay only for what your agents actually do.

Credits are prepaid and never expire; at zero balance agents pause gracefully, so there are no surprise bills. Agencies and developers can sell the same platform under their own brand through the white-label partner programme, and set their own client pricing.