How much does it really cost to have someone answer your business phone in Canada? For an Ontario small business, quite a bit more than the hourly wage makes it look.

Job Bank puts the median wage for a receptionist in Ontario at $20.50 an hour, using Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey data. Forty hours a week works out to $42,640 a year in wages. Then come the employer contributions, which are not optional: CPP at 5.95% on earnings above the $3,500 exemption, and EI at $2.28 per $100 of insurable earnings under the 2026 rates. That takes the direct payroll cost to roughly $45,900. And that's before you've spent anything on benefits, recruiting, training, a desk, a computer, or covering the weeks when that person is away.

If what your business needs is the phone answered, callers qualified and appointments booked, an AI receptionist prices very differently. AlmaTalk, built by ALMA Intelligence in Ottawa, starts at $97.97 a month for 150 minutes of answered conversation. The 400-minute plan is $247.97. Annually that's $1,175.64 or $2,975.64, which is somewhere between 93% and 97% less.

That percentage is the least useful number in this article, though. On its own it's misleading, so here's the fuller picture.

They're not the same job, and it's worth saying so

Nobody should pretend an AI receptionist does everything a receptionist does. A person greets people at the door, signs for packages, keeps the office running, and knows when a situation needs handling carefully rather than efficiently. Software can't walk across a room.

What's changed is telephone reception, specifically. If the job is answering calls, working out what the caller wants, dealing with routine questions, qualifying leads, booking appointments and passing on the ones that need a human, then paying someone to sit next to a phone waiting for it to ring is no longer the only option.

One person doesn't cover one phone line

A full-time schedule is roughly 40 hours. A week has 168. Covering a single position around the clock takes 4.2 full-time schedules, and that's before anyone takes a holiday or calls in sick.

Most small businesses don't need somebody at a desk at three in the morning. Plenty of them would still like the phone answered at three in the morning. Those are different problems.

There's also the simpler limit: one person handles one call. Everyone else hears it ring.

Paying for availability, or paying for conversation

An employee gets paid for their shift whether the phone rings thirty times an hour or not once. That's fair enough. They're selling availability as much as labour.

Software works differently, because nothing is sitting idle between calls. With AlmaTalk you're buying answered conversation, measured by the second. That sounds like a small detail. answering service Ontario It isn't, once you know how long business calls run.

What 5,649 business calls showed

Across 5,649 completed business calls handled on AlmaTalk and its predecessor platform, covering four different business configurations, the average conversation came in at about 80 seconds.

That's first-party operational data, not a claim that every Canadian business averages 80 seconds. Your mileage will vary by industry. But it does expose something about how these services get priced.

An 80-second call billed by the second uses 80 seconds. The same call, with a provider who rounds up to the next whole minute, becomes 120 billable seconds. You've just paid 50% more than the conversation lasted. Once a month, fine. Across a few hundred calls it stops being a rounding quirk and starts being a line item.

So don't just ask an answering service in Ontario, or any AI vendor, what it costs per month. Ask what they're counting, and how they round it.

What $97.97 actually buys