The price is $90 a month.
Here is what that buys.

It depends entirely on the billing model. Human answering services are usually priced per call, per minute, or as a base plan with a minute allowance and overage on top, which means the total moves with your call volume and nobody can tell you a monthly figure until the month is over. AI answering is usually a flat monthly fee. fonea is $90 a month for the Basic plan with 120 minutes of talk time included, $290 for 500 minutes, and $590 from 2,000 minutes, with no setup fee, no per-call charge, and no minimum term.

Per-call pricing charges a fixed amount every time the service picks up, regardless of whether the call was a customer or a wrong number. Per-minute pricing runs a meter, usually rounded up, and often counts hold time and transfers. Both are typically layered on top of a monthly base plan that includes a minute or call allowance, with a higher rate once you exceed it. The practical effect is the same in both cases: your bill goes up in exactly the months your call volume does.

A virtual receptionist is a remote human, usually shared across several businesses and billed per call or per minute against a monthly base. Because a person can only take one call at a time, and because that person is also answering for other companies, pricing scales with volume and busy periods can mean hold time. fonea is a flat $90 a month, answers every call immediately, and does not put your caller in a queue behind another company’s customer. The trade-off is judgment: a human handles the unexpected call better, while fonea handles your common calls, books appointments, and transfers what you have told it to transfer.

No. fonea does not offer a free trial and does not offer refunds. The plan is month to month with no minimum term, so the smallest commitment you can make is one month, and you can cancel at the end of it. Before you pay anything you can call the live demo number and hear exactly how the assistant sounds and behaves, which tells you more than a trial period usually does.

You can top up with more minutes at the same per-minute price as your plan, so there is no penalty rate for a busy month. If you are consistently going over, the next plan up is normally cheaper than topping up every month: Basic includes 120 minutes and suits roughly 1 to 10 calls a day, Professional includes 500 minutes and suits 10 to 50, and Scale starts at 2,000 minutes for higher volumes.

No setup fee, no minimum term, and no annual contract. The published plan price covers 24/7 answering, all five languages, calendar integration and appointment booking, and email and text notifications. Nights, weekends, and holidays are not billed at a premium. If you prefer to pay annually you can, at 10% less, but the monthly plan does not require it and nothing is bundled in that you have to buy.

Compare it on what reaches you, not on the headline rate. A cheap service that puts callers in a queue, reads from a script it cannot deviate from, or emails you a message you then have to call back on has moved the work rather than removed it. The number worth calculating is cost per booked job: one recovered job a month covers $90 several times over for most trades, and no monthly saving is worth much if the caller hangs up before anyone picks up.

A part-time receptionist costs well over $2,000 a month in wages alone in most US markets, before payroll taxes, benefits, and equipment, and that still only covers business hours. Covering evenings, weekends, holidays, lunch breaks, vacation, and sick days means more than one person. fonea is $90 a month, answers every call in seconds at any hour, and takes several calls at once. It does not replace a person’s judgment on an unusual call, which is why urgent calls get transferred to you.

No. This is one of the most common surcharges in answering service pricing and fonea does not have it. A call at 11pm on Thanksgiving is billed exactly like one at 10am on a Tuesday. For most small businesses those out-of-hours calls are the highest-intent ones of the week, so charging a premium for them always seemed backwards.

You can cancel at the end of any month. Your phone number is yours throughout: fonea works through standard call forwarding from your existing carrier rather than porting your number, so cancelling means switching forwarding back off, which takes seconds. There is nothing to unwind, no early termination fee, and no number to reclaim.