Pay per call answering service: UK prices

Answering service per call pricing, provider by provider

ReceptionHQ MessageExpress pay as you go

£15 a month plus VAT and £1.10 a call. The lowest per call rate among the human-staffed services we read, and the same £1.10 is what ReceptionHQ charges for a call beyond one of its bundles.

Answer4u

£19.99 a month subscription and pricing from £1.75 per call, with email messages at £0.11 and SMS messages at £0.17 on top. Its bundles start at £43.75 a month for 25 calls, which is exactly 25 calls at the pay as you go rate.

Answer.co.uk

From £10 a month subscription with calls charged at £0.85, but this is its AI virtual receptionist rather than a person, so it is a different service from the others here.

Office Answers

Not per call but per minute: a £25 subscription plus 85p a minute of receptionist time and a £25 set-up fee, all plus VAT. A two-minute call costs £1.70 in receptionist time, so it behaves like a per call plan when your calls are short.

Every figure here was read on the provider's own page in October 2026 and is reproduced, not estimated. Arithmetic below is our own multiplication of those published rates and excludes VAT treatment, which most providers do not state.

Is there a pay as you go telephone answering service with no monthly fee?

Not among the providers we read. Every pay as you go call answering service here charges a monthly subscription before the first call: £15 at ReceptionHQ, £19.99 at Answer4u and £25 at Office Answers. Pay as you go means no commitment to a number of calls, not a free quiet month: a month with no calls still costs the subscription.

When per call is cheaper than an allowance plan

Per call pricing scales in a straight line, so it wins at low volume and loses as the calls rise. At ten calls a month Answer4u comes to £37.49 and ReceptionHQ to £26, before message fees and VAT.

At thirty calls Answer4u comes to £72.49 against £75 for Pocket Receptionist's plan with thirty calls included, so the two meet at about that point. At a hundred calls Answer4u comes to £194.99 against £230 for Pocket Receptionist's hundred-call plan. ReceptionHQ's per call rate comes to £125 plus VAT.

• Fewer than about thirty calls a month: a per call answering service is usually the cheapest model.
• A steady volume above that: price the allowance plan that covers it, and check its excess rate, which is £2.99 a call above a Pocket Receptionist allowance.
• Short calls that mostly need a message taking: a per minute plan such as Office Answers can undercut both.

What to check before you sign

• What counts as a call. Wrong numbers, cold sales calls and hang-ups decide the bill on a per call plan. Almost nobody publishes the definition, so get it in writing.
• Message delivery fees. Answer4u charges for every email and SMS alert, which adds to each call.
• VAT. ReceptionHQ and Office Answers state their prices plus VAT; most pages say nothing either way.
• Cover hours. A per call rate for weekday office hours is not the rate for nights and weekends.

The full set of charging models, with the costs that sit outside the headline price, is in what a UK telephone answering service costs.