RingCentral AI Receptionist Pricing in 2026: Add-On vs Own Agent

RingCentral AI Receptionist costs $49 a month on its own, or $39 a month on top of a RingEX plan, with 100 minutes included. Past that, each minute costs $0.50, billed in 30-second steps. Dograh, the open-source AI voice agent platform we build, prices your own agent per minute instead. You can self-host it or run it on Dograh Cloud.

Key Takeaways

• AIR includes 100 minutes, then charges $0.50 a minute in 30-second steps.
• In a busy month, overage makes up most of the bill.
• Your own agent costs about 5 cents a minute in our example build-up.

This post is part of our guide to AI receptionists, which weighs renting a finished receptionist against owning one. Here we price RingCentral's add-on and RingEX plans, one busy month as an example, what your own agent costs per minute, then the same month on Dograh.

What RingCentral charges for AI Receptionist

RingCentral sells AI Receptionist, or AIR, two ways, and both come with 100 minutes a month. RingCentral's AI Receptionist pricing lists the standalone plan from $49 a month, which answers and routes calls on any phone system. As an add-on to RingCentral's own phone service, RingEX, it is $39 a month plus the RingEX plan.

Past the included minutes, RingCentral charges $0.50 a minute on pay as you go. Call time is rounded up and billed in 30-second steps. RingCentral says extra minute bundles are available to buy, but it does not list their sizes or prices, so ask for them before you sign if your calls run past 100 minutes. The AI texting agent may also cost extra.

AIR has one monthly price. Only the RingEX plan underneath it has separate monthly and annual prices, so an annual commitment lowers the phone system line and leaves the receptionist line as it is.

Our RingCentral AI Receptionist review covers what AIR does well and how to send its calls elsewhere. This post stays on cost.

The RingEX plan under the add-on

If you buy AIR as an add-on, the RingEX plan is the other half of the bill, and it is priced per user. RingCentral's RingEX plans list three tiers, each priced lower per user on an annual plan, and AIR can be added to any of them.

For a one-user office on Core, the add-on route starts at $69 a month on monthly billing and $59 on annual. Every extra user adds to the RingEX line, while the AIR line stays at $39.

UK prices differ. RingCentral's UK AI Receptionist page lists AIR at £32 per account per month as a RingEX add-on, with 100 minutes, then £0.40 a minute in 30-second blocks.

A busy month, as an example

Here is one worked example, built from those list prices. A clinic takes 500 calls a month, each lasting exactly 3 minutes, so 1,500 minutes in all.

On the standalone plan, the first 100 minutes are included and the other 1,400 cost 1,400 x $0.50 = $700. The month comes to $49 + $700 = $749. On the add-on with one RingEX Core user, it is $39 + $30 + $700 = $769 on monthly billing, or $759 with Core billed annually. At this volume, the plan price is a small part of the bill, and overage is almost all of it.

Rounding pushes real bills higher. Calls rarely end on a 30-second mark. If each of the 500 calls ran 3 minutes 5 seconds, each would bill as 3.5 minutes, adding 250 minutes, or $125, to the month. Minute bundles could bring the overage down, so get RingCentral's bundle prices for your volume before you compare.

Open Source Alternative to Vapi / Retell

Self-hosted voice agent platform — no per-minute fees

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What your own agent costs per minute

A receptionist you run yourself has no included minutes and no overage, because every line is priced per minute. Here is one worked build-up on Dograh Cloud with a Twilio number, Deepgram for speech and voice, and gpt-4.1-mini as the language model. Phone minutes come from Twilio's US voice prices and speech from Deepgram's prices.

For the voice and model lines, we use the example call from our guide to LLM API pricing for voice agents, which runs about 480 spoken characters and $0.0025 of gpt-4.1-mini a minute. Treat those as assumptions, since a chattier agent or a longer prompt raises both.

So the example agent costs about 4.75 cents a minute, plus $1.15 a month for the Twilio number. Self-hosted, the platform line goes and a server takes its place.

The same month on Dograh

The 1,500-minute month prices out line by line on your own agent. 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. With your own keys, each model provider bills you directly.

The self-hosted line uses a $48-a-month server with 8 GB of memory and 4 vCPUs, Dograh's minimum. At 1,500 minutes the server is the biggest line, and it stays flat as calls grow until you need more capacity.

You keep your RingCentral numbers. In RingCentral, forward calls to a number on a provider Dograh connects to, such as Twilio or Telnyx, and set your agent as that number's inbound workflow. The forwarded call uses minutes on both sides, so add whatever RingCentral bills for the forwarded leg to the Dograh lines above.

The voice line is the easiest to cut further. Pre-recorded clips can play the lines your receptionist says most, with a generated voice for the rest. Every call also gets a full trace and can be scored by built-in QA, and Transfer Call can hand callers back to a staff member's RingCentral direct number, with a 30-second answer timeout by default.

For the same comparison across six receptionist apps, see our post on AI receptionist pricing. For the AI add-ons built into other business phone systems, see built-in AI receptionists vs a dedicated voice agent.