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Clinic Reception Costs: Receptionist vs Call Centre vs AI
What clinic owners pay for reception: $40K–$80K a year in-house, $300–$570 a month for call centres, AI from £139 or A$259 a month. Costs, trade-offs and sources.
Aeva AI
Aeva AI research. Source: conversations with 757 clinic owners in the year to February 2026; Aeva’s review of virtual reception pricing, July 2025; customer-reported costs 2025–2026; Aeva pricing as of July 2026. Third-party prices should be re-checked before quoting. By Chris Baxter, Co-founder & CEO, Aeva AI.
Clinic owners told Aeva they pay $40,000 to $80,000 a year for in-house reception, or $300 to $570 a month for call-centre answering services they were not happy with. Aeva’s AI receptionist plans start from A$259 a month in Australia and New Zealand and £139 a month in the UK, scaling with call volume. The table sets out what each option costs, where the figure comes from and what it does and does not cover.
The comparison
Option | Reported cost | What you get, and the limits |
In-house receptionist | $40,000–$80,000 a year (owners in AU, NZ, the UK and elsewhere, year to Feb 2026) | A person at the desk who can greet patients, calm a worried parent and adapt to anything. Covers staffed hours only, and sickness absence leaves the phone unanswered. |
$300–$570 a month as owners reported it; AU plans from A$350+ a month for 100 calls; UK from around £200+ for the same volume; some plans $3.79 a call on top of a monthly fee (Aeva review, July 2025) | Humans who handle variety across hundreds of businesses. After-hours, weekend and overflow cover cost extra. Nobody knows your clinic in depth, and the voice changes each call. | |
AI receptionist (Aeva) | From A$259 a month (AU/NZ) or £139 a month (UK), tiered by monthly call volume (July 2026) | Answers 24/7 with no time-of-day penalty, books directly into Cliniko, Splose or PracSuite, same tone every call, 150+ approved answers. Needs a supported practice management system; escalates what it cannot answer. |
Owner-reported costs were given in the currency of each clinic’s market and are shown as reported. Third-party pricing was checked in July 2025 and will have moved; verify current rates before relying on them.
What owners actually pay: four examples
• An Auckland clinic on Cliniko was spending over $20,000 a year on a local phone answering service in late 2024. A different voice every time, nobody who knew the business. It became Aeva’s first clinic.
• A UK practitioner described paying a human call centre £400 a month and being unhappy with the service.
• Liz, who runs a chiropractic clinic in Gloucester, let her receptionist go when admin costs grew too high. Admin support that had cost around £50,000 a year is now
handled by Aeva for just over £100 a month (as of February 2026; current UK plans start at £139).
• Bryce made his AI receptionist the first point of contact for every call. Five months in, his book was consistently full and the full-time reception role had shrunk to about an hour of admin a day, a saving Aeva puts at more than $50,000 a year.
Where each option wins
In-house staff are irreplaceable for the parts of the job that happen in person: the welcome, the reassurance, helping someone up the steps. The clinics getting the most from them take the phone away. Jenna’s receptionist, once tied to the phone all day, now works on marketing, social media and lead follow-up, and greets patients properly instead of apologising for being on a call.
Call centres still make sense where the setup is messy: legacy software, no booking API, workflows that change on the fly. Humans adapt to that and AI does not. Call centres are built for volume and variety, answering for a solicitor one minute and a plumber the next. Their weakness is depth. One agent answering for dozens of businesses cannot remember every detail of your clinic.
An AI receptionist wins when it is deeply embedded in one system. Aeva is built only for healthcare clinics on Cliniko, Splose and PracSuite, so it knows the booking flow, the appointment types and the cancellation rules, and it answers the same way at 2pm on a Sunday as at 10am on a Tuesday. Aeva’s own comparison, which you should treat as the vendor’s claim: typically 50 to 80% cheaper than a call centre, and 85 to 95% less than a full-time receptionist.
The cost on the other side of the ledger
Reception cost is only half the calculation. One Aeva customer who tracked every unanswered call found about sixteen new patients a month not getting through, worth $2,000 a month at $125 an initial consultation, or $24,000 a year. Ben at Essex Coast Physio, with a customer lifetime value of £750, covered his monthly cost several times over with one booking on his first day. The clinic owner’s version of the maths, heard at the Clinic Mastery Summit: miss ten calls over a weekend and lose ten opportunities; if even two are new patients, the service has paid for itself.
Common questions
How much does an AI receptionist cost for a clinic?
Aeva’s plans start from A$259 a month in Australia and New Zealand and £139 a month in the UK as of July 2026, with tiers based on monthly call volume. Outbound calling has been included in those plans at no extra cost since its launch in January 2026.
How much does a medical answering service cost in the UK?
When Aeva reviewed the market in July 2025, UK virtual reception plans typically started from around £200 a month for 100 calls, with after-hours and overflow charged on top. Check current rates before relying on this figure.
Next step
Put your own numbers in: what you pay for reception now, and the annual value of the calls that go unanswered. Then book a demo and compare it with a plan sized to your call volume.
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