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 three plans, and the right one for you is determined by three questions about how your business actually runs — not by which number looks smallest. This guide walks those three questions in order, gives you a "start here if…" shortcut, shows the plan math for when to upgrade, and explains why month-to-month billing changes how you should decide. 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 three plans, at a glance

Here is the complete lineup, with nothing hidden. All prices as of July 2026; every plan is month-to-month with zero setup fees and unlimited users.

Two things in that table decide most purchases. First, the tiers are cumulative. Pro includes everything in Core plus call tracking. Elite includes everything in Pro plus the AI growth stack. You are never choosing between features — you are choosing how far up the stack your business needs to go. 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 $250 a month.

Second — and this is the part that surprises people comparing older lineups — the entire operations system lives in the first tier. Core is not a stripped-down teaser. It includes the full IntelliDrive CRM, POS, invoicing, payment links, and technician dispatch alongside the 24/7 bilingual English/Spanish answering and GetTimePad booking. The higher tiers don't unlock more of your own operation; they add marketing intelligence (Pro) and AI-driven growth (Elite) on top of an operation that is already complete.

Two more structural notes. There is no per-call or per-booking fee anywhere in the lineup — the minutes are just minutes, so a busy month costs the same base price plus a predictable flat overage, never a metered surprise. And the overage rate gets cheaper as you move up: $0.45/min on Core, $0.40 on Pro, $0.35 on Elite, so heavy callers are never punished for growing.

The three questions that decide your tier

Ignore the prices for a moment. Answer these three 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:

• 500 minutes (Core) covers about 100 answered calls a month — roughly 3 a day, weekends and 3 a.m. included.
• 1,000 minutes (Pro) covers about 200 calls — about 6 to 7 a day.
• 2,500 minutes (Elite) covers about 500 calls — about 16 a day.

At a brisker four-minute average, those pools stretch to roughly 125, 250, and 625 calls. Robocalls and wrong numbers burn far fewer minutes than a real intake, so real-world counts usually run higher than the naive division. A solo operator or two-truck shop often lives comfortably inside Core's pool; volume tells you the minimum, and the next two questions tell you the system you need, which usually matters more.

One question you'll notice is not on this list: "do I need a CRM, invoicing, and dispatch?" On the current lineup that is no longer a tier decision — the whole IntelliDrive operations layer ships in Core. If you dispatch technicians, send invoices, keep customer history, or take card payments in the field, the entry plan already covers it, synced to QuickBooks. Our deeper look at CRM and dispatch software for multi-tech service businesses unpacks what that layer does; the plan-picking takeaway is simply that it's included from day one.

Question 2 — 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 Pro you cannot see which of those dollars turn into booked jobs. CallFlux, which switches on at $750, tracks every inbound call to its source with Dynamic Number Insertion, records and transcribes calls, scores leads, and ties 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 $250 gap. The full case is in our call tracking and attribution guide.

Question 3 — Do you want AI running your growth, not just measuring it?

The top tier, Elite, is where the platform stops reporting on your marketing and starts doing it. It adds the Jarvis AI Assistant — natural-language access to your whole operation ("what's my booked revenue this week?", "which quotes are still open?") over WhatsApp and SMS — plus an AI campaign builder for Google Ads, AI-generated ad copy and landing pages, Meta ads management, Google Business Profile management, and AI review replies.

A solo tech doesn't need an AI marketing department. A multi-truck operation with real ad spend across two or three channels, a review pipeline to maintain, and an owner who wants to manage by asking often does. Operational complexity is the tiebreaker at the top of the stack: the more growth channels in motion, the more an AI layer that builds and manages all of them is worth $450 over Pro.

"Start here if…" — the shortcut

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

• Start with Core ($500/month) if… you need the phone answered around the clock and your operation run — appointments on the calendar, customers in a CRM, invoices and payment links out the door, jobs dispatched to the right truck — and you don't spend money on ads yet. This is the "operate your business" plan, and for most trades it is genuinely complete.
• Start with Pro ($750/month) if… you do everything in Core 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. This is the "know what's working" plan.
• Start with Elite ($1,200/month) if… you're running a larger operation with active spend across multiple channels and you want AI building campaigns, writing ads, managing your Business Profile, and answering questions about the whole stack. This is the "let AI run your growth" plan.

Notice that the shortcut and the three questions agree: most single-location trades start on Core, add Pro when they start advertising, and reach for Elite as growth itself becomes the job. 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 includes 500 minutes; overage is $0.45/minute. Suppose you're consistently using 1,050 minutes — 550 over.

• Overage cost: 550 × $0.45 = $247.50/month on top of the $500 base, so about $747.50 all-in.
• Upgrade cost: Pro is $750 — a $250 gap — and includes 1,000 minutes (nearly covering your usage) plus the entire CallFlux tracking and attribution layer.

So at 1,050 minutes you'd pay $747.50 to stay on Core versus $750 to move to Pro — the same money, and the upgrade is vastly more capable. The overage was your business telling you it had outgrown the tier.

The same logic scales. On Pro (1,000 minutes, $0.40 overage), 1,100 overage minutes is $440 on top of $750 — about $1,190, essentially the price of Elite ($1,200) with its 2,500 minutes and the AI growth stack. Once your all-in cost grazes the next tier's sticker, the next tier is the better buy.

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 a call-tracking vendor, Pro folds it in and raises your minutes. If you're on Pro and paying an agency or a stack of point tools to build campaigns, write ad copy, and manage your Business Profile, Elite absorbs much of that bill. 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.

Month-to-month, and why that changes how you decide

Every tier is month-to-month with zero setup fees. There is no annual contract, no long-term commitment, and no annual pricing to weigh against monthly — the number on the pricing page is the number.

That simplifies the decision in a way owners underrate. The classic plan-picking anxiety — "what if I commit to the wrong tier?" — mostly evaporates when there's nothing to commit to. Start on the tier that matches how your business runs today. Watch the first month or two: the dashboard shows exactly how many calls the AI answered and how many minutes you used. If you undershot, the overage math above will flag it and you upgrade with no penalty. If you overshot, you drop a tier next month.

And because the entire operations layer lives in Core, moving between tiers is low-stakes in a way it wasn't on older lineups: a downgrade from Pro to Core turns off call tracking and attribution — it does not touch your CRM, your customer records, your invoicing, or your dispatch. You never lose the ability to run your business by changing plans; you only change how much intelligence is layered on top.

If you're genuinely torn between two adjacent tiers, start on the lower one. It's cheaper to discover you need to upgrade than to pay for a system you weren't using, and the flexibility is precisely what month-to-month billing is for.

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. The minutes matter, but the tiers are systems: if you're advertising on Core, no minute pool fixes the fact that you can't see which campaigns book jobs. Decide the system first (Questions 2–3), then confirm the minutes cover you.

Skipping attribution while spending on ads. Running paid campaigns on Core 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 $250 tier gap. If you advertise, you need Pro.

Over-buying Elite too early. Elite is powerful, but a solo operator with 200 calls a month and one ad channel won't extract $1,200 of value from an AI marketing department. Grow into it. The AI growth stack earns its keep when there are genuinely multiple channels and campaigns for it to build and 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 500 minutes is plenty.

Downgrading to save money after a slow month. Call volume for service trades is seasonal, and one quiet month is not automatically a reason to drop a tier. The good news: the stakes are lower than they used to be, because Core keeps your full CRM, invoicing, and dispatch no matter what — a step down from Pro costs you visibility, not capability. But think twice before dropping attribution in a slow season specifically: that's exactly when knowing which ad dollars still produce booked jobs matters most, because it tells you where to cut without cutting revenue. Pick the tier that matches your normal-season operation and ride out the lulls; the base price is predictable precisely so you can plan around it.

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. 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: 1,100 minutes blows past Core's 500 — on Core they'd eat 600 overage minutes at $0.45, about $270 on top of $500, or roughly $770 all-in with no attribution. The operations needs — invoicing, field payments, two-truck dispatch — are fully covered by Core's IntelliDrive layer, so ops don't force a tier the way they used to. Ads are a yes at $400/month, which points squarely at Pro for CallFlux attribution. Team complexity is moderate, not large — Elite's AI marketing stack is more than they need today.

Verdict: Pro ($750/month). Their 1,100 minutes sit just over Pro's 1,000 included, so a busy month adds about $40 of overage at $0.40/min — roughly $790 all-in, barely more than what Core-plus-overage would cost while adding the attribution that tells them whether their LSA spend books jobs. Core would leave them advertising blind for nearly the same money; Elite would be paying $450/month for an AI growth engine they're too small to feed. 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 spend on ads (that's the Pro line). Answer whether you want AI building and running your marketing, not just measuring it (that's the Elite 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 — remembering that the full operations system is yours from Core, whichever tier you land on.

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 and no contract holding you to a wrong guess. 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, ad spend, and growth plans.