How to Choose an AI Receptionist Plan for Your Service Business (2026)

The plan you pick is a business decision, not a pricing decision

Most people choose an AI receptionist plan the way they choose a phone plan — scan the tiers, find the cheapest one that doesn't feel embarrassing, and click. That works for phones because the tiers only differ by quantity. It does not work here, because the Run with Jarvis tiers differ by capability: each one switches on an entire system your business either needs or doesn't.

As of July 2026 there are four plans, and the right one for you is determined by four questions about how your business actually runs — not by which number looks smallest. This guide walks those four questions in order, gives you a "start here if…" shortcut, shows the plan math for when to upgrade, and settles the monthly-versus-annual question. By the end you should be able to name your tier and defend the choice.

If you haven't yet decided whether an AI receptionist belongs in your front office at all, read what an AI employee actually is first and come back — this article assumes you're buying and asks only which tier. And if your hesitation is about the money, the companion ROI breakdown runs the break-even arithmetic in detail.

The four plans, at a glance

Here is the complete lineup, with nothing hidden. All prices as of July 2026; annual billing is about 17% off every tier.

The single most important thing to notice in that table: the tiers are cumulative. Business System includes everything in Core plus the CRM. Growth Intelligence includes everything in Business System plus call tracking. Jarvis OS includes all of it plus the AI Brain. You are never choosing between features — you are choosing how far up the stack your business needs to go. That reframes the entire decision. You don't ask "do I want CallFlux?" in isolation; you ask "does my business need call-source attribution yet?" If the answer is no, you stop one tier lower and save $200 a month.

Two more structural notes. Every tier — even the $329 entry plan — includes the full 24/7 bilingual English/Spanish answering and online booking. Nothing about the receptionist itself is gated behind a higher price; you get the whole front door from day one. And the minutes are just minutes: there is no per-call or per-booking fee anywhere in the lineup, so a busy month costs the same base price plus a predictable flat overage, never a metered surprise.

The four questions that decide your tier

Ignore the prices for a moment. Answer these four questions about your business, and the plan will pick itself.

Question 1 — What is your monthly call volume?

This is the floor. Every plan can do the receptionist job; the minutes decide how much of it fits before overage. Convert your call volume into minutes using your own average call length — service intake calls (greeting, qualify, quote, book, confirm) commonly run four to six minutes. Time your last ten calls; it's the single most useful number you can gather before choosing.

At a five-minute average:

• 400 minutes (Core) covers about 80 answered calls a month — roughly 2.6 a day, weekends and 3 a.m. included.
• 900 minutes (Business System) covers about 180 calls — about 6 a day.
• 1,800 minutes (Growth Intelligence) covers about 360 calls — about 12 a day.
• 2,500 minutes (Jarvis OS) covers about 500 calls — about 16 a day.

Robocalls and wrong numbers burn far fewer minutes than a real intake, so real-world counts usually run higher than the naive division. Still, volume alone rarely forces you above Core's minute pool — a solo operator or two-truck shop often lives comfortably in 400–900 minutes. Volume tells you the minimum; the next three questions tell you the system you need, which usually matters more.

Question 2 — Do you need a CRM, invoicing, and dispatch?

This is the question that moves most trades off the entry plan. Core Automation answers and books — it does not run your customer records, send invoices, take payment, or dispatch technicians. The moment your business does any of the following, you need Business System's IntelliDrive layer:

• You send invoices or take card payments and want them tied to the customer and job.
• You run more than one technician and need to assign and dispatch jobs.
• You keep a customer history — past jobs, quotes, vehicles, equipment — and want the AI and your office looking at the same record.
• You already pay for QuickBooks or Square and want the CRM to sync with it.

If you're a one-person operation who invoices by hand and never dispatches anyone, Core can genuinely be enough. But if you route work to techs, the CRM-and-dispatch tier isn't a luxury — it's the difference between a booked appointment and a job that actually gets to the right truck. Our deeper look at CRM and dispatch software for multi-tech service businesses unpacks exactly what that layer does.

Question 3 — Do you spend money on ads?

If you run Google Ads, Local Services Ads, or Meta campaigns, you are spending real dollars to make the phone ring — and below Growth Intelligence you cannot see which of those dollars turn into booked jobs. CallFlux, which switches on at $699, tracks every inbound call to its source, records and transcribes calls, and builds ROI dashboards that tie ad spend to booked revenue.

The test is simple: if you can't currently answer "which campaign produced last month's booked jobs?" and you're paying for ads, you're flying blind, and the attribution layer usually pays for itself by killing one underperforming campaign. If you get all your work from referrals, repeat customers, and organic search, you can skip this tier and save the $200 gap. The full case is in our call tracking and attribution guide.

Question 4 — How big and complex is your team and operation?

The top tier, Jarvis OS, adds the Jarvis AI Brain — natural-language commands over your whole operation and an autonomous workflow engine that acts on your data proactively rather than waiting to be asked. This is the tier for owners who want to manage by asking ("what's my booked revenue this week?", "which quotes are still open?") and who have enough volume and complexity that a workflow engine tuning the operation earns its keep.

A solo tech doesn't need an autonomous brain orchestrating five systems. A multi-location operation with several trucks, thousands of customers, and active ad spend often does. Team size and operational complexity are the tiebreaker at the top of the stack: the more moving parts, the more a layer that watches and optimizes all of them is worth $300 over Growth Intelligence.

"Start here if…" — the shortcut

If you'd rather not walk all four questions, match yourself to the closest description:

• Start with Core Automation ($329 / $274 annual) if… you're a solo operator or very small shop, you mostly need the phone answered around the clock and appointments on the calendar, you invoice by hand or don't invoice much, you don't dispatch multiple techs, and you don't run paid ads. This is the "stop missing calls" plan.
• Start with Business System ($499 / $416 annual) if… you book jobs and run them — invoices, payments, a real customer history, and one or more technicians to dispatch. This is the most common landing spot for established trades, because dispatching work is where a booked appointment turns into revenue, and that needs the CRM.
• Start with Growth Intelligence ($699 / $583 annual) if… you do everything in Business System and you spend money on ads. The instant you have a Google Ads or LSA budget, you need to know which calls it produces and whether they book — that's CallFlux, and it lives here.
• Start with Jarvis OS ($999 / $833 annual) if… you're running a larger or multi-location operation with real complexity and you want the AI Brain managing workflows and surfacing recommendations across the whole stack. This is the "run the business by asking" plan.

Notice that the shortcut and the four questions agree: most single-location trades that dispatch techs land on Business System, add Growth Intelligence when they start advertising, and reach for Jarvis OS as they scale. The path up the stack mirrors the path a service business grows.

The plan math: when overage says "upgrade"

Because overage is a flat published rate, you can compute the exact point at which staying on a lower tier stops making sense. The rule: when your overage bill for two consecutive months approaches the price gap to the next tier, upgrade — you'll get more included minutes and a new system for roughly what you're already spending on overflow.

Work the entry-plan example. Core Automation includes 400 minutes; overage is $0.59/minute. Suppose you're consistently using 750 minutes — 350 over.

• Overage cost: 350 × $0.59 = $206.50/month on top of the $329 base, so about $535.50 all-in.
• Upgrade cost: Business System is $499 — only $170 more than Core's base — and includes 900 minutes (well above your 750) plus the entire IntelliDrive CRM, invoicing, payments, and dispatch.

So at 750 minutes you'd pay $535.50 to stay on Core versus $499 to move to Business System — the upgrade is both cheaper and vastly more capable. The overage was your business telling you it had outgrown the tier.

The same logic scales. On Business System (900 minutes, $0.49 overage), 400 overage minutes is $196 on top of $499 — about $695, essentially the price of Growth Intelligence ($699) with its 1,800 minutes and CallFlux. Once you cross roughly 400 overage minutes on any tier, the next tier is usually at or below your all-in cost.

There's a second upgrade trigger that has nothing to do with minutes: paying for a tool the next tier already includes. If you're on Core and separately paying for CRM or invoicing software, Business System likely replaces that bill and raises your minutes. If you're on Business System and paying a separate call-tracking vendor, Growth Intelligence folds it in. The consolidation case is its own topic — see all-in-one vs. point solutions — but the plan-choosing takeaway is simple: count the tools the next tier absorbs before you decide the gap is expensive.

Monthly vs. annual: the about 17% question

Every tier is available monthly or annually, and annual billing is about 17% off — roughly two months free across the year. In monthly terms that's $274, $416, $583, and $833 for the four tiers.

The decision is about confidence, not cash flow. Pay monthly while you're still deciding whether the tier fits your business — the first month or two, when you're watching how many calls the AI actually answers and whether the system layer earns its place. Switch to annual once you know the receptionist is staying, which most businesses figure out fast because the answered-call volume is immediately visible on the dashboard. Locking in about 17% off a tool you've already decided to keep is free money; committing annually to a tier you're unsure about is not. Let the first month decide, then take the discount.

One nuance: if you're genuinely torn between two adjacent tiers, start monthly on the lower one. It's cheaper to discover you need to upgrade than to have overpaid annually for a system you weren't using. The overage math above will tell you within a month or two whether you undershot.

Common mis-picks (and how to avoid them)

Buying on minutes alone. The most frequent mistake is treating the tiers as a minutes ladder and picking the cheapest pool that covers your calls. That gets you Core when your business actually needs the CRM in Business System — you'll have answered calls but no way to dispatch or invoice them cleanly. Decide the system first (Questions 2–4), then confirm the minutes cover you.

Skipping attribution while spending on ads. Running paid campaigns on Business System means you're answering ad-driven calls with no idea which ads work. That's often the single most expensive mis-pick, because the wasted ad spend dwarfs the $200 tier gap. If you advertise, you need Growth Intelligence.

Over-buying the AI Brain too early. Jarvis OS is powerful, but a solo operator with 200 calls a month and no ad spend won't extract $999 of value from an autonomous workflow engine. Grow into it. The Brain earns its keep when there's genuine operational complexity for it to manage.

Ignoring after-hours as a volume driver. Businesses routinely undercount their real call volume because they only see the calls that reach a human during office hours. An AI receptionist answers nights, weekends, and overflow — so your true answered-call count (and minute usage) is usually higher than your current staffed hours suggest. Read the after-hours calls playbook before you assume 400 minutes is plenty.

Downgrading to save money after a slow month. Call volume for service trades is seasonal, and one quiet month is not a reason to drop a tier — especially if the lower tier removes a system you actually use. Dropping from Business System to Core to save $170 in a slow winter month means losing your CRM, dispatch, and invoicing, then re-provisioning them when spring volume returns. Pick the tier that matches your system needs and normal-season volume, and ride out the slow months; the base price is predictable precisely so you can plan around it. If a lull is severe enough to reconsider, switch to annual billing on your current tier instead — the annual-billing discount usually saves more than a downgrade would, without stripping capability.

A worked example: choosing for a two-truck locksmith

To make the framework concrete, picture a two-truck automotive locksmith. Volume: about 220 calls a month at a 5-minute average — roughly 1,100 minutes, above Core's 400 but under Business System's 900 by a hair on a busy month. They invoice every job, take card payments in the field, and dispatch two technicians daily. They spend $400/month on Local Services Ads. Team of four.

Walk the questions. Volume points to Business System or higher (they'll graze Core's overage constantly). CRM-and-dispatch is a hard yes — two trucks and field invoicing demand it, which rules out Core outright. Ads are a yes at $400/month, which points to Growth Intelligence for CallFlux attribution. Team complexity is moderate, not large — Jarvis OS's autonomous Brain is more than they need today. Verdict: Growth Intelligence ($699 / $583 annual) — the CRM they can't operate without, plus the attribution that tells them whether their LSA spend books jobs. Business System would leave them advertising blind; Jarvis OS would be paying $300/month for a Brain they're too small to work. The trades-specific version of this walk-through lives in the locksmith automation stack guide.

Put it together

You now have everything to name your tier. Time your last ten calls to estimate minutes. Answer whether you need CRM and dispatch (that's the Business System line for most trades). Answer whether you spend on ads (that's the Growth Intelligence line). Answer how complex your operation is (that's the Jarvis OS line). Then confirm with the plan math: if you're already paying overage that approaches the next gap, or paying separately for a tool the next tier includes, step up. Otherwise, stop where your business actually is and pocket the difference.

The tiers are built so the right answer is usually the one that matches how your business runs today, with an obvious upgrade path as you grow. Check the current numbers on the pricing page, and if you'd like a walkthrough of which tier fits your call volume and operation, book a demo — it's the fastest way to get the recommendation applied to your real numbers.

Related reading

• AI receptionist ROI for service businesses: the real 2026 math
• What AI operations actually cost in 2026
• All-in-one vs. point solutions for service business software
• CRM and dispatch software for multi-tech service businesses
• Call tracking and attribution: a service business guide

Ready to choose? Compare the current tiers on the pricing page, then book a demo to have the right plan matched to your actual call volume, team size, and ad spend.