Most pricing pages for this category are vague on purpose — "starting at," "contact sales," a features table with a blurred-out enterprise column you only see after booking a call. We built AIVA's pricing to be answerable in one sentence, so here it is, followed by the math and a few worked examples so you can do the same calculation for your own business.
AIVA's actual pricing
There's no monthly fee. It's pure pay-as-you-go, priced by usage:
- Voice calls: ₹4 per minute
- Web chat conversations: ₹2 per conversation
- SMS: ₹1 per message
That's the entire pricing model. No tiers to pick between, no minimum commitment, no separate enterprise price list. You pay for what your business actually uses that month — nothing more if it's a quiet month, nothing held back if it's a busy one.
Worth spelling out what that means in practice: there's no setup fee stacked on top of usage, no per-seat or per-staff-login charge, and no premium for running voice, chat, and SMS together instead of picking just one. The three rates above are the whole bill, whether a business uses one channel or all three.
How the billing itself gets calculated
The ₹4-a-minute rate isn't rounded up to the next full minute the way an old-style phone plan might round a call. AIVA bills proportionally to actual call length — a 40-second call costs about ₹2.70, not a flat minute's rate for a call that never used a full minute. An eight-minute call costs about ₹32, and a call that runs three minutes and fifteen seconds costs roughly ₹13, not ₹16 rounded up to the next full minute.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. A business whose calls are mostly short — a quick hours check, a yes-or-no on availability — would quietly overpay under minute-rounding, paying for seconds that were never actually used. A business with a lot of those short calls sees the difference show up directly on the monthly total, not just as a technicality. Web chat and SMS don't have this issue at all, since a conversation or a message is already a single discrete unit — voice is the one channel where the shape of the billing actually matters, which is part of why it's worth stating plainly rather than leaving it implicit in a per-minute number.
What that looks like in practice
Take a small clinic getting roughly 300 phone calls a month, averaging about 3 minutes each. That's 900 minutes, at ₹4/minute — around ₹3,600 for the month on voice. Add a web chat widget handling 200 conversations a month at ₹2 each, and that's another ₹400. Total: roughly ₹4,000 for a month of phone and chat coverage that never closes, never takes lunch, and never misses a call because someone's out sick.
This is an illustrative example, not a quote — your actual numbers depend on your call volume and average call length, which is exactly the point of usage-based pricing: it scales with what you actually need, not a tier someone else decided fits your business.
A second example, a busier business with all three channels
A salon running six days a week might see a different mix: fewer long voice calls, but more SMS traffic — booking confirmations, reminders, reschedules — since a lot of salon customers would rather text than call. Say 400 voice minutes a month at ₹4 (₹1,600), 150 web chat conversations at ₹2 (₹300), and 600 SMS messages — a mix of missed-call follow-ups, reminders, and replies — at ₹1 each (₹600). That's roughly ₹2,500 for the month, less than the clinic example above despite handling more total conversations, because the channel mix leans toward the cheaper per-unit costs. The shape of your own bill follows the same logic: it reflects how your specific customers actually reach you, not a one-size number.
A third example: a business with a seasonal swing
Take a restaurant that does steady weekday lunch business but triples its call volume during wedding season and the festival stretch around Diwali — reservation calls, large-party bookings, questions about whether it can host a private event. In a quiet month, it might see 150 voice minutes (₹600), 100 web chat conversations (₹200), and 200 SMS confirmations (₹200) — roughly ₹1,000 for the month.
During its busiest six weeks, the same restaurant might see call volume triple to 450 voice minutes (₹1,800), chat holding fairly steady at 100 conversations (₹200), and SMS climbing to 500 messages as confirmations and reminders go out for larger bookings (₹500) — roughly ₹2,500 for that stretch. Nobody has to call and renegotiate a plan before the busy season starts, and nobody's stuck paying a flat subscription rate through the quieter months that don't need it.
This is a different shape of problem than the clinic or salon examples above — not just "more or less volume," but volume that swings hard within a single year. A flat monthly plan sized for the busy weeks overcharges every quiet month; one sized for the quiet weeks falls over exactly when the phone matters most. Usage-based pricing doesn't need to be sized for either extreme, because it was never sized for an average to begin with.
How the two examples scale if volume doubles
It's worth sanity-checking the other direction too. If either business's volume doubled — a bigger location, a second busy season, a successful ad push — the bill roughly doubles alongside it, because there's no tier to jump or contract to renegotiate. That's the actual advantage of usage-based pricing over a fixed monthly plan: growth and quiet months both show up proportionally in the bill, rather than either being invisible (a quiet month on a flat plan) or requiring a renegotiation (a busy month that blows past a tier's cap).
What if you run more than one location
The math doesn't change shape when a business has two locations instead of one — it just adds up. Two clinics each running the numbers from the first example above would together land around ₹8,000 for the month, not a new, higher number negotiated for the combined account. There's no per-location fee sitting on top of usage, and no requirement to bundle every location onto a single contract before the pricing makes sense.
That matters in practice for multi-location businesses specifically, because location-to-location volume is rarely identical — a newer second location typically gets fewer calls than an established first one, and pricing that scales with actual usage reflects that automatically instead of charging both locations the same flat rate regardless of how established each one is. Multi-location coverage works the same way operationally too — one setup, per-location numbers, one combined view on the dashboard.
Why this shape of pricing matters for a small business
A flat monthly subscription is a bet that your volume will be steady enough to make a fixed price worth it. Most small businesses don't have steady volume — a salon's Saturday looks nothing like its Tuesday, a clinic's flu season looks nothing like its quiet months. Pay-as-you-go means a slow month costs less, automatically, without anyone renegotiating a contract.
How this compares to the alternative
We won't pretend to give you a precise number here — receptionist salaries vary a lot by city and experience — but a full-time front-desk hire in most Indian cities commonly runs somewhere in the ₹15,000–₹25,000-a-month range before you count the cost of covering nights, weekends, sick days, or a second hire once call volume outgrows one person. That's before it opens at all outside business hours.
The honest comparison isn't "AI receptionist vs. one salary." It's "AI receptionist vs. the actual cost of covering every hour your customers might call" — which for most small businesses is more than one person can do anyway. We've broken down where front-desk cost actually hides beyond the salary line — overtime during predictable rushes, answering-service contracts, and the bookings lost with no line item at all.
An answering service sits somewhere in between. You're typically paying a monthly or per-minute rate for a person to answer generically, without access to your specific calendar or current policies unless you've built and maintained that connection yourself — so you're paying for availability, not necessarily for a resolved call.
A rough way to think about return, not just cost
Cost only tells half the story — the other half is what a booking you'd otherwise have lost is actually worth to your business. A single missed call that would've become a repeat customer can be worth many multiples of what it costs to answer a whole month of calls. That's the actual comparison worth making, not "what does this cost" in isolation, but "what does this cost relative to what a recovered booking is worth." We've walked through that fuller calculation separately, using your own numbers rather than a generic example.
Where the free credit fits
New accounts start with ₹500 in free credit, and no card is required to get it or to use it. That's enough to actually run real calls and conversations through AIVA on your own business before spending anything — the point isn't a teaser discount, it's letting you see real numbers on your own actual call volume before you decide anything at all.
What happens when your credit runs low
Usage-based pricing raises an obvious question: what happens if a business runs out of credit mid-month, right when a call comes in? It's a fair thing to ask before relying on any usage-based system for something as important as answering your phone. AIVA handles this with auto-recharge: it watches your balance continuously and tops up automatically once it drops under a threshold you set, using a saved payment method, with headroom left before the balance would actually hit zero. You get notified whenever it fires, and it's optional if you'd rather top up manually on your own schedule instead. The fuller explanation of how it works is here.
Isn't usage-based pricing too unpredictable to budget for?
It's a fair objection, worth taking seriously rather than waving away. A fixed monthly number is easier to drop into a budget spreadsheet than a bill that moves with call volume, and "it depends on usage" can sound like a way of avoiding a straight answer.
In practice, the unpredictability is smaller than it sounds going in. Call and chat volume for most small businesses is more stable month to month than owners expect — a clinic's volume swings with flu season, a salon's with festival timing, but both settle into a recognizable range within a few weeks of real data. Once you have that range, next month's bill is a reasonable estimate, not a guess, because it's built from your own actual pattern rather than someone else's average.
The dashboard is what actually closes the predictability gap. Real-time usage tracking means you're never waiting until month's end to find out what happened, the way you might with a phone bill that only itemizes on the statement date. Auto-recharge solves the one scenario a fixed plan doesn't even have to think about: what happens if the balance runs out mid-month, unexpectedly. Between visible real-time usage and automatic top-ups, usage-based billing tends to be more predictable in practice than "pay as you go" sounds on paper.
What actually moves your bill
Three things: how many calls and conversations come in, how long the voice calls run, and the mix between voice, chat, and SMS. All of it is visible in real time on the dashboard, so there's no end-of-month surprise — you can watch the number build as the month goes, the same way you'd watch any other usage-based bill.
If you're still deciding whether AI is the right fit at all before getting into the pricing details, this is a good place to start. Otherwise, see the full pricing breakdown, or start with ₹500 free credit — no card required.