What a 2026 pricing guide says the shelf actually costs

SuperDupr's guide AI Receptionist Cost (2026), by Justin McKelvey, dated 7 August 2026 and updated 12 September 2026, prints these tiers:

• Entry SaaS, $25 to $100 a month. Basic answering, message-taking, limited minutes.
• Mid-market SaaS, $100 to $300 a month. The band SuperDupr says most small businesses land in: 24/7 answering, booking, calendar or CRM sync, SMS follow-up.
• Managed or high-volume, $300 to $1,000 a month.
• Custom-built, $3,000 to $10,000 once, plus $100 to $300 a month. SuperDupr describes this as a system built to the shop's own workflow.

The same page's worked example: missed calls per week, times close rate, times average job. Its illustration is 12 missed calls a week, a 25 percent close rate, and a $350 job, which it says is about $1,050 a week, or roughly $54,600 a year. That is SuperDupr's arithmetic on assumed inputs, not a measurement of your phone.

Where Serath sits

Serath is not in that table. Text-Back is $500 to set up and $250 a month. That monthly number is inside the mid-market band SuperDupr describes. The setup fee is the part a self-serve plan does not include: the script, the booking path, and the maintenance watch are the product, not a login the owner is left to finish. Confirm any third-party price on that vendor's own page. Guides go stale.