Best AI Receptionist for Small Business Perth: 8 Compared

<h1>Best AI Receptionist for Small Business Perth (2026): 8 Compared</h1>

<p class="intro">If you run a trade or service business in Perth, the pitch is everywhere: an AI answers your phone so you stop losing after-hours jobs. Most of these products do that well and cost less than a hundred dollars a month. A few do considerably more. This page compares eight of them on published prices and published capability — nothing estimated — and is honest about which one we build, where it wins, and the several cases where you should buy something cheaper.</p>

<h2>The comparison</h2>

<p class="note">Prices are as published on each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Where a vendor prints a bare dollar sign with no currency, we say so rather than assume. Nothing here is estimated.</p>

<h2>What each one actually does</h2> <p>Grouped by where the job actually moves. Every cell is what the vendor publishes on their own site — a dash means they do not publish it, not that it is impossible. Ask before you assume.</p>

<p class="note"><strong>Yes</strong> published &nbsp;·&nbsp; <strong>Partial</strong> partial or adjacent &nbsp;·&nbsp; <strong>Extra cost</strong> sold as a separate product &nbsp;·&nbsp; <strong>&mdash;</strong> not published</p> <p>Of 32 rows, <strong>16 are things no other product on this page sells at any price</strong> — the e-signature, the site-visit booking, the customer portal, the invoice numbering, the ads, the books, the audit trail, and running the whole thing from WhatsApp. The first six rows are a crowded market. Everything after that is not.</p>

<h2>Start here: most Perth businesses should buy one of the cheap ones</h2> <p>If the problem is <em>“the phone rings while I’m under a house and I lose the job”</em>, that problem is solved for well under two hundred dollars a month. <strong>Goodcall</strong> at $79 per agent or <strong>Hey Jodie</strong> at A$99 with unlimited minutes will answer, capture the job and text it to you. Nothing more expensive on this page will answer a phone better.</p> <p>The step up is worth taking only when the call is not the bottleneck — when the quote sits unsent for four days, the invoice goes out a fortnight late, and nobody chased the customer who said “send it through and I’ll have a look”. That is a different product: one that keeps a CRM, runs follow-up on a cadence and collects the payment. Sophiie, Valory and Nodus all sit in that band from about $149.</p>

<h2>The products, one by one</h2>

<h3>Hey Jodie — A$99 to A$399/month</h3> <p>Answering, job capture, call summaries and transfers, with unlimited minutes on every plan and no setup fee or minimum term. It is the cleanest cheap option for a sole trader.</p> <p>Two things worth knowing. Their homepage FAQ quotes A$49/month while their pricing page starts at A$99 — check which applies before you sign. And although the site is marketed to Australian tradies at an /en-au/ address, the company behind it is <strong>Jodie AI Limited, a UK company registered in London</strong>. That may be irrelevant to you. If where your customer data sits matters, ask them.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> sole traders who want the phone answered and nothing else.</p>

<h3>Sophiie AI — $99 to $819/month</h3> <p>The most capable product here under $300. Sophiie answers calls, sends quotes and invoices, creates job cards, schedules the team and follows up by SMS. Their scheduler has an unscheduled-jobs rail and a "find a time and create the job card" flow, which is closer to real job management than anything else at this price.</p> <p>Their pricing page prints a bare dollar sign with no currency and no GST statement, so confirm what you will actually be billed. Plans are metered in calls, SMS and "AI actions" — 30 calls on Starter, 500 on Pro — and no overage rate is published, so ask what happens when you exceed them.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> a trade business that wants quoting and invoicing attached to the phone without paying enterprise money. If your budget is under $300, this is the one to beat.</p>

<h3>Valory — $149 to $1,299/month AUD ex GST</h3> <p>The most transparent pricing on this page: AUD stated, GST stated, per-minute overage published for every tier ($0.90 down to $0.30), SMS overage published, and a Perth landing page. Booking, CRM and webhook integrations, SMS and email follow-up.</p> <p>Watch two numbers. Setup is <strong>from $990 one-time</strong> on top of the monthly, and outbound calling is a <strong>$99/month add-on</strong> on the two cheapest plans. The Intro plan includes 100 voice minutes — about two hours of calls.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> businesses that want to know exactly what they will be charged in Australian dollars.</p>

<h3>AIRA — $24.95 to $299/month</h3> <p>Bills <strong>per call, not per minute</strong>, which is unusual and genuinely better if your calls run long — 30 calls on Starter, 600 on Scale, then $0.70–$1.50 per extra call. Includes a CRM, booking and a pipeline.</p> <p>AIRA also sells an "AI Search" product at $1,297/month that claims to rank you on Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. It is a separate line item, not part of the receptionist plan. Aira Inc. is a US company and its terms are governed by US law; the pricing page states no currency.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> low call volume with long conversations.</p>

<h3>Smith.ai — $300 to $2,100/month</h3> <p>Lead screening, qualification and intake, with payment collection and bilingual handling. Billed per call — 30, 90 or 300 — with overage from $8.50 to $11.50 per call, which is the most expensive per-interaction pricing here.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> professional services where a single qualified lead is worth thousands and intake is genuinely complex.</p>

<h3>Goodcall — $79 to $249 per agent/month</h3> <p>Explicitly no charge for calls, minutes or tokens. Instead it caps unique customers per month — 100, 250 or 500 — then charges $0.50 per additional customer. Booking and Zapier integration.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> steady, predictable call volume where you want one number on the invoice.</p>

<h3>Retell AI — $0.07 to $0.31 per minute</h3> <p>Not a done-for-you receptionist. It is the developer platform other products are built on: you design the agent, wire the transfers, build the knowledge base. Twenty free concurrent calls, component rates published down to the telephony leg.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> teams with a developer. If that is not you, buy one of the products above instead.</p>

<h3><a href="https://nodusaisystems.com/nodus-os.html">Nodus</a> — from A$149/month voice only, A$1,497 for the full system</h3> <p>We build this one, so read this section with that in mind.</p> <p>At <strong>A$149 a month</strong> you get the voice agent on its own: it answers, qualifies, books into your real calendar, and passes the job to you. That is directly comparable to Valory at $149 and cheaper than Smith.ai at $300 — and unlike most of this table it comes with the CRM behind it, so the call is not just an email to yourself.</p> <p>It also <strong>qualifies</strong> rather than just capturing. Every enquiry is scored, and the score decides what happens next on its own: a hot lead with an urgent timeline is called immediately rather than queued, a warm one waits in the outbound queue, and anyone who came off your website is called regardless of score. That last one is a deliberate rule of ours — we would rather ring someone who was only browsing than miss someone who was ready. Most products on this page hand you a message and leave the deciding to you.</p> <p>Every call is <strong>recorded, transcribed and summarised</strong> — you can play the audio back, read what was said word for word, and see the AI’s summary of what the caller wanted and what happens next, all on the customer’s timeline next to the quote and the invoice. Every call opens by telling the caller it is being recorded.</p> <p>Even at the entry price the call does not end at a notification. The contact lands in a <strong>CRM</strong> with a pipeline you can see, <strong>SMS and email follow-up</strong> runs on a cadence rather than when you remember, and <strong>payment collection</strong> is built in — the invoice carries your banking details and a payment link, and unpaid invoices are chased without you doing it.</p> <p>At <strong>A$1,497</strong> it stops being a receptionist and runs the job end to end: a preliminary quote goes out, the customer books their own site visit against your technicians’ real availability, the final quote is signed, the invoice issues on that signature, the job is dispatched to a named technician, the customer follows progress on their own portal, payment is chased, and a review is requested a couple of days after completion. Your <a href="https://nodusaisystems.com/nodus-seo.html">SEO</a> and your social posting run in the same system, and the books are kept in it.</p> <p>Two things nobody else on this page publishes. First, <strong>technician dispatch</strong> — assigning a job to a named person by area and availability, with the customer booking their own site visit into the gap. Sophiie schedules a team and BizAI mentions a field service module; nobody describes dispatch. Second, <strong>a complete audit trail</strong>: every decision the system makes, every observation and every recommendation is written down in plain English with its reasoning, append-only, and a reversal is recorded as a new entry rather than an edit. You can read why it did what it did, months later.</p> <p><strong>Best for:</strong> at $149, a business that wants the phone answered and the follow-up to actually happen. At $1,497, a business replacing several tools and part of a role — where the number is measured against a part-time coordinator, an <a href="https://nodusaisystems.com/nodus-seo.html">SEO retainer</a> and a scheduling subscription.</p> <p><strong>Not for you if</strong> you want a phone answered and nothing else and $149 is more than you want to spend. Goodcall at $79 does that. We would rather tell you than sell you the wrong thing — but if you want to talk it through, <a href="https://nodusaisystems.com/contact.html">tell us what you are running</a> and we will say which of these we would buy in your position.</p>

<h2>You are not buying a tier</h2> <p>Everything else on this page is a plan you pick off a page: three boxes, you choose one, you get what is in the box. That works when the product is one thing. It stops working when the phone is fine but the quoting is a mess, or the quoting is fine but nobody chases the invoice.</p> <p>Nodus is scoped instead. It starts at <strong>A$149</strong> with the receptionist, the CRM and the follow-up, and ends at <strong>A$1,497</strong> with the whole operation running — and a business that needs some of the middle gets exactly that, priced on a call rather than guessed from a table. What turns on is decided by what is actually broken:</p>

• Losing calls after hours? Start at $149. Nothing else switches on.
• Quotes going out late? Add the two-stage quote and e-signature. The site visit books itself.
• Getting paid slowly? Add invoicing and the payment chase, on your existing invoice numbers.
• Not enough coming in? Add the SEO, the social posting and the ads.
• Drowning in admin? Add the books and run the lot from WhatsApp.

<p>It is also <strong>built for your trade, not renamed for it</strong>. A plumber and a vehicle exporter get different pipelines, different intake questions and different customer messages, because the sequence a plumber works to is not the sequence an exporter works to. That is the part that takes months to build in-house and is invisible in a feature list.</p> <p>And you decide how much of it acts without asking. There are four settings, from watching only, through asking permission each time, to running unattended — and you move the dial when you are ready, not when we are.</p> <p>The honest catch: this means <strong>a conversation, not a signup button</strong>. If you want to enter a card and be live in four minutes, Goodcall and Hey Jodie do that well and we do not. <a href="https://nodusaisystems.com/contact.html">Tell us what is actually broken</a> and we will tell you where on that range you sit — including if the answer is $149, or one of the cheaper products above.</p>

<h2>What none of them do</h2>

• Nobody publishes real technician dispatch. Sophiie's scheduler and BizAI's one-line "field service solution" are the entire field. If dispatch matters to you, ask every vendor to demonstrate it.
• Nobody runs two-stage quoting. Where quoting exists it is one-shot. The preliminary estimate, site visit, then firm quote sequence that most trades actually work to is not modelled.
• No Australian or South African vendor ties SEO to the phone. AIRA sells search visibility as a separate $1,297/month product; nobody else bundles it.
• Only one does social posting and it meters the voice usage separately on top of the plan.

<h2>How to choose in ten minutes</h2>

1. Count the calls you miss in a week. Under ten and the cheapest plan will do.
2. Ask where the job actually stalls. If it is the phone, buy a phone product. If it is the quote, the invoice or the follow-up, a phone product will not fix it.
3. Get the currency in writing. Three of the products here print a bare dollar sign.
4. Ask what happens at the limit — the call, minute or customer cap — and what the overage rate is. Two vendors publish no overage rate at all.
5. Add the setup fee. One of these is from $990 before you have answered a call.

<h2>Frequently asked</h2>

<h3>What is the cheapest AI receptionist for a Perth small business?</h3> <p>Goodcall at $79 per agent per month and Hey Jodie at A$99 per month are the cheapest published plans. Both answer calls, capture details and pass them to you. Neither quotes, invoices, collects payment or dispatches. The cheapest plan that also keeps a CRM and runs follow-up is around $149 — Valory or Nodus.</p> <h3>Do any of them dispatch jobs to technicians?</h3> <p>None of the eight publish true technician dispatch. Sophiie schedules a team and creates job cards, which is the closest at its price. Nodus AI Systems assigns jobs to a named technician by area and availability and lets the customer book their own site visit into that gap.</p>

<h3>Which ones publish prices in Australian dollars?</h3> <p>Valory states AUD excluding GST. Hey Jodie states A$. Nodus states AUD. Sophiie and AIRA print a bare dollar sign with no currency; Smith.ai, Goodcall and Retell are US companies whose pages also state no currency.</p>

<h3>Is an AI receptionist worth it for a sole trader?</h3> <p>If you miss calls while on the tools, almost certainly — one recovered job usually covers a year of the cheapest plan. If you answer everything already and the problem is quoting or paperwork, a receptionist product will not help and a cheaper plan will not either.</p>

<h3>Do I need SEO as well?</h3> <p>They solve different problems. A receptionist converts the calls you already get; <a href="https://nodusaisystems.com/nodus-seo.html">SEO and AI-search visibility</a> change how many you get. Buy the receptionist first — it pays back faster and you will know within a month whether it works.</p>

<h2>Related reading</h2>

• Nodus AI Systems — what the full system runs, end to end.
• Nodus SEO — the search and AI-visibility half, sold on its own at A$249/month.
• Nodus vs GoHighLevel — if you are comparing agency platforms rather than receptionists.
• Nodus Platform — for agencies running this for their own clients.