Free AI answering services come in three forms. There is a capped free plan, a trial that ends after a set number of days or calls, and free software you run yourself. Smith.ai's free plan covers 25 calls a month. Dograh, the open-source AI voice agent platform we build, is free to self-host or can run on Dograh Cloud.
Key Takeaways
- Smith.ai's free AI plan covers 25 calls, then $3.00 per call.
- Most free offers are trials that end after days or calls.
- Free software still needs a server, a number and model keys.
This post is part of our guide to AI receptionists, where an owned agent drops the platform fee but not the hosting bill. Below, we sort free offers into plans, trials and software, list the limits on each, then add up what your own receptionist still costs a month.
Three kinds of free
A free AI answering service is usually one of three offers, and each stops being free at a different point. A free plan stays free while you stay under its cap. A trial is free for a set number of days or calls, then becomes a paid plan or stops. Free software costs nothing to download and use, and you pay for everything it runs on.
The difference matters on the first busy week. A capped plan starts charging per call, a trial ends, and free software keeps running with bills from the server, the phone line and the models.
The free plan: 25 calls a month
Smith.ai's AI Receptionist has a standing free plan. It costs $0 and covers 25 real calls a month, plus test calls, with recording, transcription, scheduling and lead routing included. Each call past 25 costs $3.00, overages are off by default, and signing up takes a card.
Twenty-five calls is less than one call a day. That suits a side business or a quiet line that rings a few times a week. Every answered call counts towards the 25 unless it comes from a known spam number, so a line that gets robocalls uses the allowance faster than the call log suggests.
The free plan does not include Smith.ai's live receptionists, so it fits calls the AI can finish by itself. A business that outgrows it moves to the paid Pro plan at $150 a month.
Free trials and where they stop
Most free offers are trials. They show whether an agent can handle your calls, but rarely what a normal month costs, because most end before a full billing cycle.
| Product | Free offer | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Upfirst | Trial | 14 days or 100 calls, whichever comes first, plus 25 texts |
| Rosie | Trial | 7 days |
| Dialzara | Trial | 7 days |
| Frontdesk | Trial | 7 days, with terms set by plan |
| Goodcall | Free demo agent | Free to build and test, paid once you connect a phone number |
| RingCentral AI Receptionist | "Try free" | Set at signup |
| Abby Connect | Trial on every plan | Human, AI or mixed answering |
| PATLive (people) | Trial on any plan | 14 days |
The card question decides how a trial ends. Upfirst asks for no card and charges nothing automatically when the trial runs out. Where a trial does take a card, put the end date in your calendar.
Spend the trial on hard calls. Ask for a person, call after hours, reschedule a booking and talk over the agent mid-sentence. Our comparison of AI receptionist software lists the tests worth running and what a pass looks like.
Free software you run yourself
Open-source software is free in another sense. Dograh on GitHub is published under the BSD 2-Clause licence, and the self-hosted version is the full platform, with no trial clock and no monthly call allowance. You install it on a server, connect a phone number and choose the models.
Self-hosted Dograh has no per-minute platform fee, but servers, model keys and phone minutes still cost money. Dograh Cloud charges a 1¢-a-minute platform fee. For the self-hosted route, that is what free means: the platform is free, and the parts it runs on are not. If you would rather skip the server, the managed Cloud version starts with credits from $5, so a first test costs a few dollars.
Model providers sometimes add free credit of their own. Deepgram gives new accounts $200 of credit with no card, enough for a long stretch of speech-to-text and voice testing. Credit runs out, though, so plan for the per-minute rates behind it.
Open Source Alternative to Vapi / Retell
Self-hosted voice agent platform — no per-minute fees
dograh-hq/dograh
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What self-hosting still costs
A self-hosted receptionist has two fixed costs before anyone calls. Dograh needs a server with at least 8 GB of memory and 4 vCPUs, and a DigitalOcean droplet that size is $48 a month. A Twilio local number adds $1.15. Before the first call, the server and one number come to $49.15 a month. Our guide to self-host a voice AI agent with Docker covers the install.
Every minute then adds usage lines. On Twilio, an inbound minute is $0.0085 and the audio stream to the agent another $0.0044. Deepgram's Nova-3 speech-to-text is $0.0077 a minute, and its Aura-2 voice $0.030 per 1,000 spoken characters. A small language model such as gpt-5-nano is $0.05 per million input tokens and $0.40 per million output tokens. Our post on AI receptionist pricing adds these up for a 300-call month.
Two choices shrink those lines. Pre-recorded clips can play your most common lines in a real voice, which cuts the characters you pay a voice provider for. Local open-weight models remove the per-minute and per-token model bills altogether, in exchange for a GPU server, roughly one 24 GB card for a full speech and language stack.
Which free option fits your calls
Match the offer to how your phone rings. A line with a handful of calls a week fits a capped free plan and may never pay. A business choosing between products should run two trials in the same fortnight, with the same test calls on each.
Free software fits a business that wants no platform fee and its call data on its own servers, as long as someone can look after a server. Whichever you choose, read what happens on day 15 or call 26 before you sign up, because that is when free stops.
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Glossary
- Free plan
- A plan that stays at $0 while usage stays under a cap, such as Smith.ai's 25 AI-answered calls a month. Past the cap, each call is charged or the service stops.
- Free trial
- Full or partial use for a fixed number of days or calls, after which the account becomes a paid plan or stops. Some take a card at signup and charge when the trial ends.
- BSD 2-Clause licence
- The open-source licence Dograh is published under. It lets anyone use, change and run the software, including commercially, as long as the copyright notice is kept.
- Open-weight model
- An AI model whose weights you can download and run on your own hardware. Running one removes the per-token or per-minute bill from a model provider, at the cost of a GPU server.
