Build1 publisher2 min readPublished
ElevenLabs' $29 receptionist tier answers one call at a time
Reception bundles the voice model, a phone number and a calendar write into a self-serve plan with 75 included minutes a month. That works out at about 39 cents a minute, the rate a home-built inbound agent has to beat.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski launched Reception on September 16th, a self-serve phone service that answers inbound calls, checks calendars, books and reschedules appointments and sends transcripts afterwards.
- Setup can scan the business website and pull out services, prices, appointment durations, employee names, hours and locations, and ElevenLabs says a business can configure the whole thing in under five minutes.
- Published integrations cover Google Calendar, Zapier, webhooks and Model Context Protocol servers, with access varying by subscription. ElevenLabs has not put out accuracy or escalation figures for Reception.
Compiled by The EngineerSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost The lowest advertised rate, $24 a month for Basic, requires a year of commitment from the smallest buyers, and it saves about 17 percent against paying monthly.
- constraint With one concurrent call on Basic, peak simultaneous callers are the trigger for moving up a tier.
- exposure Medical offices handling protected health information are shut out of the self-serve entry price and pushed onto the Enterprise ElevenAgents path to get a business associate agreement.
Divide the cheapest plan by its allowance. Basic is $29 a month for 75 call minutes, or about 39 cents an included minute [6][1]. Extra minutes bill at 45 cents, roughly 16 percent above that average [6][2].
The price table changes units partway down. Basic counts call minutes; Plus and Premium count credits, with overage quoted at 38 and 30 cents per credit [6][7][8]. The credit-to-minute conversion is missing from the published rates. Read it as one to one and Basic plus overage stays cheaper than the $79 Plus plan up to about 186 minutes a month, from 29 + (186 - 75) x 0.45 = 79 [3]. The Plus-to-Premium crossover lands near 591 credits [7]. Any other conversion moves both numbers, so the conversion is the first thing to ask about before modelling a year of spend.
Premium's included rate works out near 20 cents a credit at $199 for 1,000, about half what Basic charges per included minute [8][4].
For a team weighing its own stack, 39 cents is the per-minute figure to beat, and the packaged version already carries the number, the calendar availability check and the appointment write [6][16]. At 75 minutes a month, though, per-minute efficiency barely enters into it: the bill is $29 of fixed fee and nothing else, so a build competes on the cost of keeping the integration alive. runtimewire.com wrote that small-business owners are unlikely to assemble a voice model, phone provider, calendar connection and agent workflow themselves [17]. That reasoning is weaker for a shop already running an LLM and a telephony account in production. Either way, the published record carries no accuracy or escalation numbers to decide on [13].
The trial is 14 days with 30 phone minutes and a dedicated number, no credit card [10]. That is enough to hear how the agent handles a caller who talks over the greeting. It is not enough to see a Friday at closing time.
ElevenLabs' pricing sits below Smith.ai's paid plans, and Smith.ai runs a free tier of 25 calls a month and can escalate selected conversations to live receptionists [15]. Comparing 25 calls with 75 minutes requires an assumption about call length: at three minutes a call the two allowances are the same size, and at six minutes Basic buys about 12 calls [6].
What to watch
- Whether ElevenLabs publishes how many minutes one Plus or Premium credit buys. That conversion sets both tier crossovers.
- Any Reception-specific numbers for booking accuracy or escalation to a human.
- Whether HIPAA support arrives in Reception itself or stays on the Enterprise ElevenAgents path with a business associate agreement.