Two good products with very different meters.

You run a salon, clinic or studio where the calendar IS the business

Look hard at Reception.

Their scheduling model is genuinely built for this - services, staff, resources, availability windows, a public booking page customers can use themselves. If booking against multiple practitioners is the whole job, that depth is the product, and you should evaluate it properly rather than taking our word for anything.

You answer a good share of your own calls

KaiCalls.

Both products let your phone ring first. The difference is the bill: their published rate charges staff-answered minutes at the same rate as AI-answered ones, so picking up your own phone eats the allowance you paid for. On KaiCalls it costs nothing, because Kai was never involved.

Your call volume is spiky and you hate surprise bills

KaiCalls.

Past your credits, Reception bills per credit by tier. A busy month is a bigger invoice. We have no per-minute overage at any tier - a sustained change in volume gets you a plan recommendation and a notice first, and you can decline it. Price both at your real monthly minutes before you decide.

You will never log into a dashboard

KaiCalls.

Everything you can do in our dashboard you can also do by calling your own number and asking for it, and it is live on the next call. That is the difference that shows up at 7am on a roof when you realise the greeting is wrong.

Reception is an AI receptionist from ElevenLabs, built on their ElevenAgents platform and launched in September 2026. Per their documentation it answers inbound calls in 70+ languages with automatic language detection, books appointments against staff and resource availability, keeps client records, offers a public booking page, and returns a summary, transcript and recording after each call. It is a serious product from a company that makes some of the best speech technology in the world, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Yes. Their launch announcement says you can "pick up first and let Reception cover the calls nobody reaches, or it can take over once you close", and you can forward an existing business line or start with a number they assign. So on that specific feature we are not different. What is different is the meter: their published pricing lists "staff-first calls (human answers)" at 1.0 credit per minute, the same rate as calls their AI handles. On KaiCalls, a call you answer yourself is not billed against your allowance at all, because Kai never handled it.

This is the real difference, and it is structural rather than a matter of who is cheaper. As of September 2026, ElevenLabs publishes Reception at Basic $29/month for 75 credits, Plus $79/month for 275 credits, and Premium $199/month for 1,000 credits, where one minute of a phone call is one credit. Past your credits you pay per credit: $0.45 on Basic, $0.38 on Plus, $0.30 on Premium. KaiCalls is flat: Kai Backup at $10/month covers ~20 Kai-answered calls/mo, and there is no per-minute overage at any tier. Run your own numbers against both - at some volumes theirs will come out lower, and we would rather you found that out from us than felt misled later.

There are no per-minute overage charges. Your plan includes an expected monthly call allowance. If your call volume stays higher, we recommend the next plan and notify you before anything changes. You can choose to keep your current plan, and we move you back down if volume drops.

On Reception, per their published plan table, quite a few: Basic and Plus include one receptionist and one location, Premium raises that to three receptionists and twenty locations, and phone numbers go one, three, five across the tiers. Their docs also describe a separate after-hours agent with its own rules as a higher-tier capability. On KaiCalls every software feature is on every plan - the plans differ only in answered-call allowance and how many phone lines you get. Neither approach is wrong, but if you are comparing entry prices, check what the entry price actually includes.

On KaiCalls, yes - you can port your number to us, and there is a help page walking through it. Reception’s documentation describes choosing an area code and being assigned a number from their pool, and their launch post offers forwarding your existing line rather than moving it. Forwarding works, but the number still lives with your old carrier and you are still paying them for it. Ask them directly whether porting is on the roadmap.

Run the whole thing by calling your own number. Kai recognises the owner and becomes an admin secretary - "who called today?", "text Maria back", "change my greeting", "what did that caller want?" - and the change is live on the next call. Reception is configured from a dashboard. That difference matters most for the owner who is on a roof or under a sink at the moment they realise the greeting is wrong. We would also point at in-call payments and the separate field-worker check-in line, but be honest with yourself about whether you would actually use those.

Call both demo lines and be a difficult customer: interrupt, change your mind halfway through, ask for something it cannot do and listen to how it recovers. Then work out your real monthly minutes and price both models at that number, including the overage. Then ask each vendor how you change what the agent says, and how long that takes to go live. The voice is the easiest part of this to get right and the least predictive of whether you will still be paying for it in a year.