Compare · Inbound answering
One price, however busy the month gets
Per-call human answering charges you for arrivals, so your best month costs the most. A reserved connection is one monthly price, held for you whether the phone rings once or all day. And every step a caller walks through is a step you wrote down yourself.
Two things to buy, defined
Two ways to buy someone answering your phone. The difference shows up on the invoice in your busiest month, and again in who decides what a caller hears.
What Vocapable sells
A reserved connection
A monthly price for one concurrent inbound answer, held against your own traffic from the moment it is paid for. Buy more and more callers can be in an agent conversation at the same instant. The price does not move with how many people ring you, and the steps a caller walks through are the ones you wrote down.
The other model
Per-call human answering, by definition
A price per call, per message, or per minute of a person’s time. What you pay tracks how many people ring you, so a busy month and a quiet month cost different amounts, and what the caller hears is whatever the brief you wrote said.
Seven axes a buyer can actually check
Every one of these is structural: who owns what, who writes what, and what the bill is a function of. They are the parts you can check for yourself before you spend anything.
| Axis | A reserved connection | Per-call human answering, by definition |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | A reserved concurrent connection, priced by the month. | Arrivals, priced per call, per message, or per minute of an operator’s time. |
| What a busy month costs | The same monthly price as a quiet one. | More than a quiet one. That is what pricing arrivals means. |
| Two callers at the same moment | One connection answers one of them. Buy a second and both are answered. | A function of how the operator pool is staffed at that moment. |
| Who decides what the caller hears | You do, per number: your open hours in your own timezone, then an ordered chain of a keypress menu, your own people, the agent, your voicemail, a spoken message, or a forward. | You write a brief, and the people answering work from it. |
| Whose number, whose carrier | Yours. The number you already publish, on the Twilio subaccount you already own, pointed at a signed webhook. | Whatever that arrangement specifies. |
| What exists afterwards | A call record for every call, with the four floor controls running on an answered call exactly as they run on a placed one. | Whatever that arrangement records. |
| What the price includes | The plan base with its included connection, plus each additional connection. That is the whole of the invoice. | Whatever that plan says it includes. |
The right-hand column is the definition of per-call answering. It names no vendor and reports no vendor’s terms. Everything in the middle column is a first-party statement about how Vocapable works, checkable against the agreements published on this site.
What reserved means here
Exactly what the word covers, in the words the decision record uses, so the answer you get on a call is never smaller than the answer on this page.
Held against your own traffic
Read straight off your subscription, live from the first connection you pay for, with nothing to configure. Your own dialer at full pace cannot take the connection you bought, because the inbound and outbound counts never draw from one another.
Yours, rather than fleet-wide
The reservation is against your own account, which is the part you can plan around. The platform-wide inbound reserve is a separate thing and it ships at zero, so “reserved” here means reserved against your own traffic and nothing wider.
One connection carries a much bigger flow
A keypress menu, a ring to your own people, a forward and a spoken message claim no reserved capacity at all. Only the agent leg does. That is why one connection can carry an answering flow far larger than the concurrency it bought.
The caller lands where you chose
When every connection you bought is busy, the caller advances to the next step you wrote down, usually your own voicemail. Nobody sits listening to hold music, because what happens next is the thing you configured to happen next.
The whole answering policy, the six step types, both chains, and how the open hours you set in your own timezone differ from the compliance calling windows computed against the person being called, is on the Receptionist page.
What you pay, and when you pay it
The plan
$250/mo
Includes 1 concurrent inbound connection, live from the moment it is paid for. Sold on its own, or attached to an outbound subscription for the same monthly money.
Each additional connection
$150/mo
In any quantity. Each one lets one more caller be in an agent conversation at the same moment.
And that is the invoice
An answered call carries no per-call-attempt fee and no per-minute AI charge: both are charged on the calls an account places. So the plan and the connections you chose are the whole of what you owe us.
A connection is prepaid a full month when you buy it, whatever day of your billing period that falls on, and it goes live the moment that charge succeeds. Buy one a few days before your subscription renews and it pays its prepaid month and then renews. Checkout tells you the exact amount and the exact renewal date before you agree to anything.
The other direction is the one worth having in writing: a receptionist you already hold is not switched off over a single failed payment. A card that fails in month four leaves it answering while the dunning process runs, because the caller it would strand is your caller rather than you.
The whole rate card, including the outbound plans a receptionist can be attached to, is on the pricing page.
Three things that stay in your favour
The parts that still matter a year in, written down before you buy.
- The number stays yours. The receptionist answers on your own Twilio subaccount, on a number you already publish or port in, pointed at a signed webhook. Connecting that account is the longest step in getting started, you do it once, and it is the reason the number, the registrations and the caller-ID reputation stay with you. Your own carrier bills you for the carrier service directly, at the rates you negotiated.
- Answering capacity your dialer cannot take. Receptionist is bought as inbound answering, and the two capacities never draw from one another, so a campaign at full pace leaves the connection you bought to answer with exactly where it was. Want the same account placing calls too? An outbound plan sits alongside it for the same monthly money.
- What you can hold us to is the mechanism. A connection reserved against your own traffic, and an answering policy that advances the caller to whatever you configured next. The policy is yours to compose and review in the sandbox before you spend anything, and the whole agreement is published here so you read it before you sign it.
The trust close
An answered call leaves a record either way
The four controls that have no off state run on a call you answer exactly as they run on a call you place, and nothing in your answering policy can reach them: the AI disclosure plays before the first model token, an opt-out is detected and written to your internal do-not-call list, that list suppresses, and numbers are normalized before anything reads them.
The outbound-only checks are recorded as not applicable, each with the reason it does not apply, so an answered call reads in your evidence as an answered call rather than as a call that slipped its checks. Every entry names why it is there.
You and your advisors decide what the law requires where you operate. The platform applies the values in force on every call and writes down what bound it, so the record is waiting for you when somebody asks.
What an answered call records
- Outbound screening, not applicable: the caller initiated the contact.
- Outbound consent, not applicable: someone reaching you does not grant consent to call them.
- Calling windows, not applicable: nothing was dialed.
- Frequency caps, not applicable: nothing was dialed.
- Outbound suppression, not applicable: it suppresses outbound contact, not a call somebody placed to you.
The whole shape of a call’s record, and the division of responsibility around it, is on the Trust Center.
Questions people ask first
Why compare a monthly connection with a per-call price at all?
Because they are two different purchases, and the arithmetic differs before anything else does. A per-call price scales with how many people ring you, so a busy month and a quiet month cost different amounts. A reserved connection is one monthly price, held for you whether or not anyone rings, so arrivals do not move it. You are the only person who knows your call volume, and with a reserved connection your busiest month costs what your quietest one did.
What happens when every connection is busy?
The caller advances to the next step you wrote down, which is usually your own voicemail. Nobody sits listening to hold music, because what happens next is whatever you configured to happen next, which is why the fallback step is worth writing carefully. Buying another connection is what lets one more caller be in an agent conversation at the same moment.
What happens to my receptionist if a payment fails in month four?
It keeps answering. A connection you already hold is not switched off over a single failed payment; it stays live while the dunning process runs, because the caller it would strand is your caller rather than you. The other direction is the one worth having in writing too: a new connection is prepaid a full month at purchase and goes live the moment that charge succeeds, and checkout tells you the exact amount and the exact renewal date before you agree to anything.
Do I keep my own number?
Yes, and it is the point rather than the paperwork. The receptionist answers on your own Twilio subaccount and the number you already publish, so the carrier relationship, the registrations and the caller-ID reputation stay yours. Connecting and verifying that account is the longest step in getting started, and you do it once.
What does a busy month add to a Receptionist invoice?
Nothing beyond the plan price and the connections you chose to buy. An answered call carries no per-call-attempt fee and no per-minute AI charge, because both are charged on the calls an account places. Your own carrier invoices you for the carrier service directly, so a Vocapable invoice carries no carrier line: no carrier minutes, no number rental, no markup. The busiest month you have all year costs what the quietest one did.
Compose the answering policy before you buy the connection
The sandbox gives you the whole builder: no card, no carrier account. Walk through exactly what a caller would hear before any number points anywhere. When it sounds right, Receptionist is one purchase in Billing.
Related: the Receptionist product page, and telephony ownership for why the number stays yours.