What does a call answering service cost in Northern Ireland?

If you've spent an evening trying to price this up, you'll know the pattern. Page after page about professionalism and local knowledge, and never a number. The only button is book a consultation.

I went and checked. Hub NI, whose published address is in Holywood, puts no prices on its virtual reception page and points you to a phone number or a consultation booking. Call Pal in Ireland doesn't publish rates either, although its FAQ is upfront about the commitment: call answering runs on a three month minimum, then monthly rolling. alldayPA describes its telephone answering as pay per call or per minute, your choice, then sends you to a quote form.

Some do publish. ReceptionHQ lists from-prices, with live message taking starting at £15 a month plus VAT. A from-price still leaves the important question open, because it doesn't tell you how many calls that buys.

There's a decent reason behind the silence. When a real person answers your phone, the provider's cost is that person's time, so the price genuinely does depend on how much of it you use. They can't quote until they know your volume. The knock-on effect for you is that comparing two providers means sitting through two sales calls before you have two numbers to put beside each other.

Per answered call. A fixed amount every time somebody rings and the service picks up. Answer.co.uk publishes £2.20 plus VAT per call for new pay as you go customers, with no contract and a minimum £25 of credit to start. myalldayPA's headline rate is from 99p per call. Of the rates I could find published, that's the cheapest way to buy a small number of calls.

Per minute. You pay for talk time. Paperclip publishes 85p a minute on top of an £85 monthly support charge, bills in whole minutes rounded up, charges 20p for each call transferred to your own numbers, and lists setup at £99 for organisations up to 100 employees. Per minute suits a business whose callers say what they need in thirty seconds. It punishes anyone whose callers like a chat.

Bundled minutes or calls. A monthly fee buys an allowance, then you pay a rate for anything over it. The headline price tells you least on this one, because the number that actually decides your bill is the overage rate.

Flat monthly. One price, whatever the month does. Harder to do with human receptionists, for the reason above. More common with AI answering, because answering the two hundredth call costs the provider about the same as answering the first.

Every figure above is as published in August 2026, and most of them exclude VAT. Check both before you compare anything.

• Setup. Paperclip publishes £99 for organisations up to 100 employees. ReceptionHQ's own cost guide says setup is zero on two of its plans and £20 on the others. Answer.co.uk's guide puts typical onboarding somewhere between £0 and £150.
• Rounding. Paperclip rounds up to the whole minute, so a call that runs to two minutes and five seconds is billed as three. ReceptionHQ says it bills per second on its minute-based plans. Across a hundred short calls that difference is real money, and it never appears in the headline rate.
• Minimum terms. Call Pal's FAQ states a three month minimum, then monthly rolling. Answer.co.uk's pay as you go has no contract. Hub NI and myalldayPA both say no long term contracts. Ask about the notice period separately, because monthly rolling and thirty days notice are two different promises.
• Evenings and weekends. ReceptionHQ makes a point of saying there's no after hours surcharge on its plans. When a provider advertises the absence of something, that's your cue to ask everyone else whether they charge it.
• The busy month. This is the one that catches people out. Per minute bills and bundle overages are biggest exactly when a burst pipe, a bad week of weather or a good advert sends your phone mad. That's the month you can least afford a surprise invoice, and it's the month the invoice is largest.

Take a joiner in Derry who forwards the phone when he's up a ladder. Say a normal month brings 25 answered calls at about three minutes each. A busy month, after a bad spell of weather, brings 70 calls at about four minutes each. Here's the arithmetic on the rates published above, as at August 2026.

• Per call at £2.20. £55 in the normal month. £154 in the busy month.
• Per call at 99p. £24.75 normal. £69.30 busy.
• Per minute at 85p with an £85 monthly charge. 75 minutes is £63.75 plus £85, so £148.75 normal. The busy month is 280 minutes, £238 plus £85, so £323. Transfers and rounding sit on top of that.
• Flat at £249. £249 in the normal month. £249 in the busy month.

Two honest things fall out of it. In the normal month, pay as you go at 99p a call costs roughly a tenth of a flat £249 plan, so if you only take a handful of calls a month, buy pay as you go and stop reading. In the busy month the per minute bill more than doubles while the flat one doesn't move, and my per minute figure is flattering, because I assumed clean four minute calls with no rounding up.

That's arithmetic on published rates, not a quote from any of those companies, and what they'd actually quote you will differ. The point isn't which provider wins. It's that the model you sign up to decides whether a good month for your business is also an expensive one.

My prices are on the pricing page and they don't move. Starter is £249 a month, Pro is £449, Enterprise is £749. Flat, with no per minute billing and nothing charged per call inside your plan's monthly cap. Pro adds SMS follow up, booking integration and weekly ROI reports. Enterprise adds multi-line, custom integrations and bi-weekly strategy calls.

Further down I tell you to get six answers out of any provider before you sign. It'd be a cheek not to give you mine, so here they are.

• VAT. I'm not VAT registered. I trade under the £90,000 UK turnover threshold, so no VAT is added and £249 means £249. If I ever have to register, you'll get that in writing before it lands on an invoice.
• Minimum term. None. It's 30 day rolling and you can cancel any time. There's an annual option at 15 percent off if you'd rather pay up front, and that one does tie you in for the year, so take it only if you're sure.
• Notice period. The 30 days you're already paying for. Tell me and the current month finishes out.
• Setup. Free. It takes about five days and there's no fee for it.
• What varies. Only calls over your monthly cap: 65p a call on Starter, 45p a call on Pro. That's the whole of it.
• Billable calls and rounding. Neither applies, because I'm not billing you by the call or by the minute inside your cap. A wrong number costs you nothing and a long chat costs you nothing.

What you're buying is an AI voice receptionist that sits behind the number you already have. Call forwarding sends your unanswered calls to it, so your number, your cards and the sign on your van all stay as they are. It takes the caller's name, their number and what they need, then texts the lead straight to you. You decide when it picks up: overflow while you're on the tools, after hours, weekends, or around the clock. There's more on what it does, plus pages for tradesmen and plumbers.

Being straight with you: this is not a person sitting in an office in Holywood or Dublin. It's software. Some callers can tell, and some businesses genuinely need a human voice with local knowledge and the judgement to go off script. If that's you, one of the providers above suits you better than I do, and I'd rather write that here than skirt round it on a sales call.

I haven't published a case study, because I don't yet have measured results worth publishing. One of them, a joinery business, worked out they were missing roughly ten out of hours calls a month before they came to me. I'm not going to tell you what happened after that, because I haven't measured it properly. When I have, it'll go up here with the numbers attached.

Start with what you're losing rather than what you'd spend. Work out roughly how many calls you miss in a week and what an average job is worth to you. The missed call calculator does that sum. If the answer comes out small, a per call service is your cheapest option and this whole article has been a long way of telling you to buy pay as you go.

If the answer is big enough to bother with, ring a few providers and ask all of these:

• What counts as a billable call? A wrong number, a cold sales call, the same customer ringing back twice.
• Do you bill per second, or round up to the whole minute?
• What's the minimum term, and what notice do I give to leave?
• Is there a setup fee, and is the price you've quoted before or after VAT?
• What would my bill have been in my busiest month last year?
• Can I put a cap on the spend?

Anyone worth using will answer all six without going quiet. My own answers are in the section above. If you'd like to go through it for your own business, get in touch or start here. I'm in Derry, I run this on my own, and I answer my own phone. There's more on how it works locally on the Northern Ireland page.