Best AI Receptionist for Plumbers (2026): An Honest Comparison
Four AI receptionist companies, checked at their own pricing pages in September 2026. None of them are built for plumbing specifically. Here's what that means for your shop.
If you search “best AI receptionist for plumbers,” you get roundup posts that read like they were written by the companies they’re ranking. Most don’t tell you the billing unit. Some don’t tell you the price at all until you book a call.
Here are four AI receptionist companies, checked at their own pricing pages in September 2026, plus where Plumber Secretary fits in that lineup. None of the four below are built specifically for plumbing. That matters more than the price does, and it’s worth understanding before you pick one on cost alone.
Rosie: general small-business receptionist, minute-based
Rosie publishes three plans on its own pricing page:
- Professional: $49 per month for 250 minutes
- Scale: $149 per month for 1,000 minutes, adds calendar booking and live call transfers
- Growth: $299 per month for 2,000 minutes, unlimited custom scenarios
The catch is the Professional tier. It doesn’t include calendar booking or live transfers, the two things a plumbing shop actually needs from an answering service. To get those, you’re on the $149 tier, not the $49 one advertised as the entry price.
Rosie is built for small businesses in general, not plumbing specifically. Its own marketing covers salons, law offices, and med spas alongside home services.
Smith.ai AI Receptionist: per-call, free tier available
Smith.ai runs two separate products: a human-staffed “Virtual Receptionist” line starting around $300 a month, and a distinct “AI Receptionist” product priced differently. The AI product is the relevant one here:
- Free: $0 per month for 25 calls, then $3.00 per additional call
- Pro: $150 per month for 75 to 300 calls depending on volume tier
- Enterprise: $500 per month for 300 to 1,000+ calls
The free tier is real, which is unusual in this category. Twenty-five calls a month is roughly one every business day. A plumbing shop with any real call volume, especially during an emergency rush, clears that fast and lands on the $3.00 per-call overage.
Smith.ai is a general-purpose product used across legal, medical, and home service businesses. It isn’t trained on plumbing-specific intake, which is the gap why most AI answering services fail plumbers goes through in detail.
Dialzara: cheapest sticker price, tightest minute caps
Dialzara has the lowest advertised entry price of the four:
- Business Lite: $29 per month for 60 minutes, then $0.48 per minute
- Business Pro: $99 per month for 220 minutes
- Business Plus: $199 per month for 500 minutes
- Business Elite: $349 per month for 1,000 minutes, then $0.35 per minute
Sixty minutes sounds like a lot until you count real plumbing calls. A burst-pipe call that covers the problem, the address, access details, and scheduling can run several minutes on its own. At $29 a month, a handful of real calls uses the whole allowance, and every call after that costs $0.48 a minute regardless of what it’s about.
My AI Front Desk (Frontdesk): bundled channels, credit-based
Frontdesk’s Business-in-a-Box plan is $99 per month, or $79 billed annually:
- 200 voice minutes per month
- 100 chatbot conversations, 400 SMS messages, 500 email drafts, 300 web form submissions
- Everything beyond that draws from a shared pool of overage credits
This is the widest feature bundle of the four. It’s also the hardest to price against your actual usage, because voice, chat, SMS, and email all draw from the same credit pool at different rates. A busy month on any one channel can burn through credits meant for the others.
The pattern across all four
None of these four companies are built for plumbing. They’re general small-business receptionist products that plumbing shops happen to use. That shows up in two places: the billing unit, and what the AI actually knows how to ask.
A generic script doesn’t know that a customer describing a hissing sound near a water heater might mean a gas leak, or that “no hot water” and “no water at all” are two different urgency levels. Why most AI answering services fail plumbers covers what happens when a general-purpose bot takes a plumbing emergency call. For the billing side specifically, what an AI receptionist costs a small business breaks down per-minute, per-call, and flat pricing models in more depth than there’s room for here.
Side by side
| Company | Starting price | What you get for it | Billing meter | Built for plumbing? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rosie | $49/mo (Professional) | No booking or live transfer until $149/mo tier | Minutes | No, general small business |
| Smith.ai AI Receptionist | $0/mo (25 calls) | Free tier real, then $150/mo for up to 300 calls | Calls | No, general small business |
| Dialzara | $29/mo (60 min) | Cheapest sticker price, tightest allowance | Minutes | No, general small business |
| My AI Front Desk | $99/mo ($79 annual) | Widest channel bundle, shared credit pool | Credits across voice/chat/SMS/email | No, general small business |
| Plumber Secretary | $95/mo (Starter) | 24/7 answering, booking, and emergency triage included at every tier | Flat monthly, no per-minute or per-call charge | Yes, plumbing only |
Where Plumber Secretary fits
Plumber Secretary charges a flat monthly fee at every tier, with no per-minute or per-call meter running underneath it:
- Starter: $95 per month
- Growth: $295 per month
- Pro: $495 per month
Booking, emergency triage, and call summaries are included starting at the Starter tier, not held back for a higher plan. Bella is trained specifically on plumbing calls: burst pipes, sewage backups, gas smells, no water versus no hot water, the calls that actually come into a plumbing shop’s phone. You can hear her take a real call at (669) 284-5564.
That doesn’t make Plumber Secretary the right fit for every shop. If most of your calls are short and infrequent, a per-call plan like Smith.ai’s free tier might genuinely cost less some months. What it does mean is that you’re not shopping the same product across all five rows in that table. Read the meter, not just the sticker price, and decide based on what a real month of your calls would actually cost on each plan.
Before you sign anything
- Ask what counts as a billable minute or call, and whether wrong numbers and robocalls count against your allowance.
- Confirm booking and live transfer are included at the price you’re being quoted, not a tier above it.
- Ask whether the service has handled plumbing-specific intake before, or whether you’d be the one training it.
- Get the overage rate in writing before your first real month, not after the bill arrives.
- Run your own call log through the pricing, not the vendor’s example month.
Every price above was checked at the company’s own pricing page in September 2026. These pages change. Confirm the current number before you sign anything.
