Smith.ai is $10.00 a call. The question is what you get for it
Smith.ai is the most visible name in this category and it is visible for good reasons. It publishes its prices, it is genuinely strong in legal, and its free AI tier is the most generous in the market. It is also metered per call, which means the month your phone goes mad is the month your invoice does.
Every competitor figure on this page was read from their own pricing page on 2026-09-05
Incoming callMartin Osei“I am paying per call and half of them are people selling me something.”
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- $10.00
- per call on Smith.ai's entry human plan: $300 a month for 30 calls
- $11.50
- per call for the thirty-first and every call after it
- $99
- flat at Vandial's entry rung, with unlimited call flows and no overage
Smith.ai and Vandial, on published figures
Read from smith.ai's own pricing pages on 14 August 2026. Smith.ai sells two separate products and both are shown, because comparing only the cheaper one would be dishonest.
| Meter | Entry price | Marginal cost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vandial | Per unique customer | $99/mo, unlimited call flows | None. The plan caps talk time, not calls |
| Smith.ai (AI) | Per call | Free for 25 calls, then $150/mo for 75 | $3.00 per call on Free, $2.00 on Pro, $1.67 on the $500 Enterprise tier |
| Smith.ai (human) | Per call | $300/mo for 30 calls | $11.50 per call over 30 |
- smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist · read 2026-09-05
- smith.ai/pricing, human-first · read 2026-08-14
- goodcall.com/pricing · read 2026-09-05
What the per-call meter does to a trade with weather in it
Take a plumbing business on Smith.ai's entry human plan: $300 a month for 30 calls. A hard freeze arrives and the phone does 140 calls in a week. The first thirty are covered; the other hundred and ten are $11.50 each. That is $1,265 on top of the subscription, for the week you were most glad somebody was answering.
On their AI plans the arithmetic is gentler at $2.00 or $3.00 a call, but the shape is identical: the busiest week is the biggest bill. On a flat plan metered on unique customers, that week costs nothing extra, and a customer who rings four times about the same job counts once.
This is not a criticism of Smith.ai's pricing. It is a statement about which businesses each meter suits. If your call volume is steady and low, per-call is genuinely cheaper.
Booking, and what each one does with a caller who wants Thursday
Smith.ai's AI tier includes scheduling through Calendly and similar tools, which is real booking and better than most of this category manages. Their human receptionists work from your instructions and can book where you have given them access.
Vandial reads the capacity remaining in your Google, Outlook, Apple or CalDAV calendar and writes the appointment during the call, then texts the confirmation before the caller hangs up. The difference is narrower than most competitor pages would claim, and it is worth testing both rather than taking either of our words for it.
Where the two products are actually built differently
Smith.ai is built around the intake conversation and it is strongest where the intake is the product, law firms above all, which is where its content, its integrations and its case studies concentrate.
Vandial is built around dispatch and refusal. The escalation ladder rings your people in order and requires a keypress to accept, so a phone in voicemail cannot silently swallow a 2am emergency. The capture questions, the hard escalations and the refusals are configured per trade across 31 of them, so a locksmith is asked whether a child is locked in the vehicle and a property manager is asked which unit. That is a different centre of gravity, not a better one.
The comparison Smith.ai publishes about us
They do not, yet. They do publish comparison pages against Ruby, AnswerConnect, Avoca and others, and those pages are a fair place to check whether we have characterised their product accurately. We would rather you did that than take this page at face value.
Every figure here came from smith.ai/pricing and smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist on 14 August 2026 and is linked above. If they have changed, their page is right and this one is stale.
Where they are the better answer
A comparison page that finds nothing to admire anywhere else is an advertisement. This is the honest version.
Smith.ai's free tier and its legal depth are both genuinely better
Twenty-five real calls a month at $0, including recording, transcription, summaries, lead qualification, routing and Calendly scheduling, is the most generous free tier in this market and considerably more than our free tier offers, because ours has no phone number at all. And if you run a law firm, Smith.ai's depth there is not something we match: the integrations, the intake workflows and the volume of legal-specific material behind it represent years of focus on one vertical. A firm whose main question is "who understands legal intake" should probably buy Smith.ai.
Hear it before you decide anything
The free tier builds the agent, takes your services and your prices, and lets you talk to it in the browser. Nobody should hand their phone to something they have not argued with first.
How much does Smith.ai cost?
Their human receptionist plans are $300 a month for 30 calls, $810 for 90 and $2,100 for 300, with overage of $11.50, $10.50 and $8.50 a call. Their AI plans are free for 25 calls a month, $150 a month for 75 calls, and $500 a month for 300. Read from their pricing pages on 14 August 2026.
What is the cheapest Smith.ai alternative?
Of the vendors that publish figures, Goodcall at $79 a month per agent. Vandial is $99. Both meter on unique customers rather than per call, which changes the comparison substantially once your volume is variable.
Is Smith.ai worth it?
For a law firm, or for a business with steady, low call volume that needs a human voice, very likely yes. For a trade where one week a year triples the phone, the per-call meter is expensive in exactly the week you needed it most.
Does Smith.ai book appointments?
Their AI tier schedules through Calendly and similar tools, and their human receptionists can book where you have granted access. This is one of the areas where the two products are closer than a competitor page usually admits.
What does Vandial do that Smith.ai does not?
A keypress-accepted escalation ladder that a voicemail box cannot intercept, per-trade capture and refusal configuration across 31 trades, and a flat meter with no per-call charge and zero-rated spam. Where Smith.ai is deeper is legal intake and the free tier.
Still comparing
The rest of what somebody deciding this actually needs to read.
Answered for your trade, in your words
The questions, urgency rules and escalations are configuration. 31 trades have their own page.