The sticker price is the least of it
A full-time front-desk person in a lot of markets runs somewhere around $35,000 to $45,000 a year in salary alone. That number already makes most one and two-person businesses flinch. But the salary is just the down payment on the real cost.
Add payroll taxes, which stack on top of wages. Add benefits if you offer them. Add the workspace, the computer, the phone, the software seats. Add the time you spend hiring, onboarding, and training, and then doing it all again when they leave. The all-in cost of a front-desk seat is meaningfully higher than the salary line suggests.
And for all of that, you get one person, working set hours, who can do one thing at a time. That's the comparison most owners never actually run. They look at the salary, decide they can't afford help, and go back to answering the phone themselves.
What the salary doesn't buy you
A human receptionist goes home at five. They take lunch, vacation, and sick days. The leads that come in at 7 p.m. or on Saturday morning, often your best, most motivated leads, hit a dark front desk anyway. You're paying for coverage you don't fully get.
They also have a ceiling on simultaneity. Two calls come in at once and one goes to voicemail. A rush hits and things get dropped. They have a bad day, a slow day, a distracted day. None of that is a knock on them; it's just what one human can do.
So even at $45,000 all-in, you haven't solved the core problem, never missing an inbound, ever. You've just moved it from your shoulders to theirs during business hours, and left the nights, weekends, and overflow uncovered.
What an AI receptionist costs, and covers
An AI receptionist answers every call and inquiry, at any hour, without overtime, sick days, or a ceiling on how many it can handle at once. Two come in at the same time at midnight on a holiday, and both get caught. The cost structure isn't a salary plus taxes plus benefits plus a workstation. It's a predictable subscription that's a fraction of a hire.
ART3RY does the front-desk work, fields calls and inquiries, gathers details, drafts replies, and schedules around your calendar, connected to your real email and calendar so it's working from what's actually true. It doesn't forget, doesn't quit, and doesn't go dark at five.
The honest comparison isn't 'AI is cheaper than a person,' although it is, by a wide margin. It's that the AI receptionist covers the hours and the overflow a single hire never could, for a small slice of the all-in cost of that hire.
Where a human still wins, and where the line is
We're not going to pretend an AI does everything a great front-desk person does. A skilled human reads a room, handles a delicate complaint with warmth, and exercises judgment on the messy edge cases. That's real, and it's worth saying plainly.
ART3RY's answer isn't to fake that judgment. It's to keep you, the owner, in the loop for the moments that need it. Anything that sends a message on your behalf, charges a card, or posts publicly waits for your one-word YES on your own phone. The routine, high-volume work runs on its own; the judgment calls come to you.
That split is exactly how ART3RY runs Central Valley Process Servers, a real one-person company. The assistant covers the desk at a fraction of a hire's cost, and the owner makes the calls that need a human, with a single reply.
Run the numbers for your own shop
Take your own situation. Estimate what a front-desk hire would cost you all-in, salary, taxes, benefits, equipment, the hours you'd spend managing them, and then subtract the nights, weekends, and overflow they still wouldn't cover. Compare that to a subscription that covers all of it and asks for your approval before anything reaches a customer.
For most owners, the math isn't close. The AI receptionist costs a fraction of the hire and covers more of the day. The only thing a human adds, judgment on the hard edge cases, you keep, because you're still the one saying yes.
Want the real numbers for your business? Email [email protected] and see what covering your front desk actually costs when it never clocks out.