Your next hire, or an agent for part of the job: what each costs a small business

A business with 10 to 50 people usually makes its next hire for one of four seats: someone to answer the phone, someone to follow up on leads, someone to keep the office running, or someone to keep the books. Each seat has a part that repeats all day. The same questions come in, the same reminders go out, and the same details are copied from one system to another.

This post prices each seat from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It then prices an agent that takes the repeating part, from Twilio's and Anthropic's published rates, and works one month through line by line. We read every rate on November 12, 2026. Rates change, so check them again before you budget.

What does each seat cost?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the median pay for each occupation. Pay is only part of what a hire costs. In office and administrative support jobs, wages are 68.7% of what an employer spends on a worker, and benefits are the other 31.3%: paid leave, insurance, retirement and the employer's share of payroll taxes. Dividing the median pay by 0.687 gives the cost of the seat.

These are national medians, so the same seat in your city may cost more or less. The secretary figure covers BLS's whole group of secretaries and administrative assistants. Recruiting, training and the weeks before a new hire is up to speed are not in the table.

Which part of a seat can an agent take?

An agent takes the part of a seat that follows the same steps every time, inside limits set for it, and hands everything else to a person. The handoff is what makes an agent safe to put on a phone line, and we wrote about it in Voice agents that know where they stop.

The lead follow-up and office rows are agents we have built: the appointment setter, the help desk and the requests line. We have not built an agent for the bookkeeping seat, so it is not in this table.

What does an agent cost to run?

An agent on the phone or in a text thread pays for a phone number, for each minute and each text, for the voice that turns speech into text and back, and for the model that writes each reply. These are the published US rates as of November 12, 2026:

On every turn of a conversation the model reads its instructions and the conversation so far, so most of the model's cost is input. Anthropic bills a repeated part that it has cached at $0.10 per million tokens, which cuts that cost sharply. The worked month below leaves caching out, so its model lines are on the high side.

A worked month

Take one agent on one local number that answers the front desk and follows up on leads. In a month it answers 1,200 minutes of inbound calls, sends 3,000 text replies of one segment each, and receives 2,000 texts. We assume each call minute uses 40,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens, and each text reply 6,000 input tokens and 150 output tokens. Carrier fees assume $0.0045 per text sent and $0.0035 per text received, and the campaign fee is taken at its $10 top.

Over a year that is $3,718.20, plus the $59 to register for texting once.

A fair comparison is by the hour. A receptionist at the median costs about $26.59 an hour with benefits, for every hour on the schedule, busy or quiet. The agent's call minutes above cost $0.1635 each, which is about $9.81 for an hour of talk, and it costs nothing between calls. It also answers at 2 a.m. and on a Sunday at the same rate.

The comparison has limits. The agent covers the calls and texts that follow a script and passes the rest to a person. For most businesses that means the next hire comes later, or the person already in the seat spends the day on the work that needs a person.

What does the monthly number leave out?

The lines above appear on a vendor's invoice. Three costs do not:

• The build. Someone writes the agent's limits and its sources, connects it to the CRM, the calendar and the phone line, and tests it against real conversations. It is a one-time project, and its size depends on how many systems the agent has to reach.
• Review. Someone reads the transcripts, corrects wrong answers and adds the questions the agent could not answer to its sources. Plan for that time every week in the first months.
• Upkeep. Prices, policies and connected systems change, and the agent's sources have to change with them.

Hire a person instead when the repeating part is a small share of the seat, or when the work is mostly judgment, relationships or decisions only a person can make.

Why decide at 20 people rather than 50?

At 20 people, how the front desk works usually lives with one or two people, and they can say exactly which calls repeat and where each one goes. That is the material an agent's limits are written from. At 50, the business has usually hired around the gap, and the same process is spread across several people's habits that nobody has written down. The agent costs the same to run either way. It costs less to build while the process is still small enough to write down in one sitting.

Questions to ask before you build

Whoever builds it, us or anyone else, get these answers in writing:

1. Which calls, texts or tasks repeat, and how many of each come in a month? Count them before you price anything.
2. What will the agent never do, and who does it hand off to when it reaches that point?
3. What does it answer from, and who keeps those sources current?
4. What does each line of the running cost come to at your volumes, beside the vendor's published rate?
5. Who owns the phone numbers, the agent's instructions and the conversation records if you change vendors?
6. Who reads the transcripts, and how often?

If you want these numbers worked through for your own seats, book a discovery call.

Common questions

Is an AI agent cheaper than hiring a receptionist?

For the part of the job it can do, yes. At the national median a receptionist costs about $55,330 a year with benefits, or about $26.59 an hour for every scheduled hour. In our worked example an agent on the phone costs about $0.16 a minute, roughly $9.81 an hour of talk, and nothing between calls. The agent covers the calls and texts that follow a script and hands the rest to a person, so it lets a business put off a hire or keep a person on the work that needs one. It does not take the whole seat.

What does an AI phone and text agent cost to run each month?

In our worked example, an agent on one local number that answers 1,200 minutes of calls, sends 3,000 texts and receives 2,000 costs about $310 a month at Twilio's and Anthropic's published rates as of November 2026: the number, call minutes, AI voice, text and carrier fees, the text campaign fee, and the model. The build, the review time and the upkeep come on top.

What should an AI agent in a small business never do?

Whatever needs a person's judgment or authority: quoting a price, granting an exception to a policy, handling an upset customer, or answering a question its sources do not cover. A well-built agent names those limits in advance and hands the conversation to a named person when it reaches one.

What costs are not in an agent's monthly bill?

The build (writing the agent's limits, connecting it to the CRM and calendar, and testing it), someone's time reading transcripts and fixing answers, and the upkeep when prices, policies or connected systems change.

Sources

• Receptionists, BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook
• Customer Service Representatives, BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook
• Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook
• Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks, BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook
• Employer Costs for Employee Compensation and Table 4, by occupational group, BLS, June 2026
• Twilio Voice pricing, United States
• Twilio SMS pricing, United States
• Twilio A2P 10DLC
• Twilio Conversational AI pricing
• Claude API pricing