What does an AI phone assistant cost for a small business?

The cost of setting up an AI phone assistant for a small Irish business is a fixed price agreed before work starts, not an open-ended project or a rolling licence you sign up to before you've seen anything working. At dooco, the first version is delivered as a Starter Engagement — scope and price locked in at the start, with a working system at the end. What that fixed price is depends on what you need the assistant to do and what it needs to connect to.

What you're paying for

A phone assistant isn't a software subscription you turn on. You're paying for a working setup tailored to your business: the calls it handles, the information it carries, the tone it speaks in, and the point at which it hands over to a person.

That setup takes time. Someone has to understand your call patterns, write the responses, configure the handover logic, test it against real calls, and refine from there. That's the work the Starter Engagement covers. What you end up with is something built for your business, not a generic template.

Once it's live, there are usually ongoing costs — software licences for the underlying tools, and if you want continued updates and refinements, a Retainer. But the Starter Engagement is a single fixed price, not a drip of costs over time.

What affects the price

Three things move the scope and cost of a phone assistant setup:

How many types of calls it needs to handle. An assistant that answers three standard questions is simpler to build than one covering ten different query types with different data behind each. The more varied your incoming calls, the more configuration the system needs.

Whether it connects to your existing systems. If the assistant needs to pull live data — stock levels, order status, appointment availability — it needs to connect to wherever that data lives. That connection takes more setup than a standalone assistant that works from fixed information.

The handover design. What happens when a call goes beyond what the system handles is part of the build. Simple handover — transfer to a number, take a message — is quicker to configure than something more structured, like routing to the right team member based on what the caller said.

None of this means more complexity is automatically better value. For most small businesses, an assistant handling the four or five questions that take up most of your phone time is a significant improvement, without needing the more complex setup.

Ongoing costs after go-live

Once the assistant is running, there are three kinds of ongoing cost to be aware of.

The first is software: the tools that power the assistant carry a licence cost. This is usually small relative to what the system saves in staff time, but it's a real cost and worth understanding before you start.

The second is updates. Your business changes — opening hours shift, new products come in, your process evolves. Keeping the assistant current is work, and that's what a Retainer covers. It's a monthly arrangement that keeps the system accurate and adds the next piece of automation when the time is right.

The third is the cost of getting the scope wrong first time. A phone assistant that handles the wrong calls, or that hands over at the wrong moment, creates more friction than it removes. The setup conversation exists to avoid this — we agree what the system does before a line of work gets started.

What it costs to not have one

This is the question most people don't ask, but it matters. Every routine call your team handles — the opening hours question, the order status check, the stock query — has a cost: someone's time. At a busy trade counter or in a practice with a front desk, that time adds up in a way that's easy to underestimate because each individual call is short.

An AI phone assistant replaces those calls with a system that handles them without tying up a person. The right benchmark isn't what the assistant costs in isolation — it's whether what your team currently spends on routine calls is worth more than a one-off setup fee.

For most small businesses fielding a steady volume of repeat questions, the answer is yes. How quickly it pays back depends on call volume and what your team's time is worth.

What to do next

The honest starting point is a short conversation about what comes in on your phone and how your team handles it. From there, we can tell you what a first working assistant would need to do, whether the scope is simple or more involved, and what you'd be looking at before you see it working.

See what a phone assistant Engagement looks like at dooco, or get in touch directly at hello@dooco.com.