What are you actually paying to look after your customers?
Two bills, one answer. The staff hours it takes to cover your phone, and the pile of subscriptions doing the rest. This adds up both honestly — including the parts that never make it onto a spreadsheet — and compares them to one system.
Every number, and where it came from.
A calculator you cannot check is a sales page with sliders. Here is the whole method.
How the labor cost is built
- Wages. Hourly wage × hours covered per week × 4.33 weeks a month. The default wage for each role is the published median cited below; drag the slider to what you actually pay.
- Payroll tax and benefits. A percentage on top of wages. The 43% option matches BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, where benefits are 30.1% of total compensation for private industry workers — which is a 43% load on top of the wage itself. The lower options strip out health insurance and then paid time off.
- Workstation, turnover, and ramp-up. A desk, a computer, a phone line, a software seat, the cost of recruiting a replacement spread over a year, and the weeks a new hire is supervised before they handle calls alone. Each is a separate toggle you can turn off if it does not apply to you.
- Headcount and desks, counted separately. Covering more than 40 hours a week takes more than one person, so hiring and ramp-up costs multiply by headcount. A desk, though, is shared across shifts — so the workstation cost multiplies by the number of desks, not the number of people. Wages are already counted by the hour either way. Paid time off is priced in the benefits load, not in headcount.
How the software total is built
- Every price is a real published list price on monthly billing, read off the vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, and linked so you can check it.
- Where a category's leaders refuse to publish prices — reputation platforms are the worst offenders — we use the cheapest competitor that does publish. So the total is lower than what many businesses actually pay. Third-party trackers put Podium and Birdeye at $299–599 a month; we use a $75 tool instead.
- Categories default to ticked only where a small service business genuinely tends to buy them. Turning everything on would produce a number nobody believes.
- Anything we only partly replace is marked as such and counts half. Invoicing is the honest example — we send invoices and take payment, we are not your ledger.
- Payment processing is excluded entirely. At 2.4–3.5% of card revenue it would dwarf every other line, and we do not replace it. Counting it would make the total impressive and dishonest.
How the Vantaro cost is built
- The plan price, exactly as listed on the pricing page.
- Optionally the one-time setup fee spread across twelve months, so year one is compared fairly. Turn it off to see the steady-state cost from year two.
- Coverage is all 168 hours in a week, every week. That is not a marketing claim, it is what an always-on system does.
How the recovered revenue is estimated
Your inquiry calls per week × the share currently going unanswered × 55% × your close rate × your average customer value.
That 55% is the one number we made up, and we made it up conservatively: it is the share of missed calls that an instant text-back or an AI answer turns back into a real conversation. Some people were never going to buy, some already booked elsewhere in the thirty seconds it took, and some do not want to text. Everything else in that formula is a number you entered. It is an estimate, not a promise, and it is deliberately shown below the cost comparison because the cost comparison is the part that is just arithmetic.
What this calculator does not do
- It does not pretend a receptionist has no value beyond the phone. A person greets patients, handles walk-ins, and reads a room. This compares phone coverage, which is the part that can run at 2 AM.
- It does not assume you fire anyone. Most owners keep their front desk and stop losing the overflow — in that case read the savings as the cost of the second hire you no longer need.
- It does not include your existing phone bill, which stays roughly the same, or per-minute overages above your plan allowance, which depend on volume.
- It does not pretend every tool you own is redundant. If your trade software is your system of record — Jobber, Housecall Pro, a dental PMS — keep it. We work alongside it and handle the conversations around it.
Sources
- BLS — Receptionists: $17.90 median hourly, May 2024
- BLS — Secretaries and administrative assistants: $47,460 median annual, May 2024
- BLS — Customer service representatives: $20.59 median hourly, May 2024
- BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026 — benefits are 30.1% of total compensation for private industry workers
- BLS OEWS, May 2025 — office and administrative support median: $22.81 hourly
- Market estimates from published provider pricing. Labelled as estimates, not survey data.
Wage medians are national. Cost of living in your area runs below the national average, so if you are hiring locally your wage is probably lower than the default — drag it down and the comparison still holds, because the payroll tax, benefits, and coverage gap do not go away. See what each plan includes.
Now hear the part the spreadsheet cannot show you.
We call your business after hours, record what happens, and play you the same call handled by the AI. That fifteen minutes is what actually decides it.
Built in America, for American businesses.