How much do AI replies cost?

AI replies at LastWorker cost $0.04 per generated response for chat, email, or SMS. This feature is off by default. Manual human responses are free forever with no limit on the number of conversations or teammates. You can choose between manual mode, draft for review, or fully automatic mode. You can switch back to manual at any time.

I have spent eighteen years managing front desks and service operations. In the dental practice I worked with, we had eleven different people answering phones and checking emails across various locations. The biggest headache was always the math of the software. Most tools make you pay for every person who needs a login. If I wanted a new receptionist to be able to see the help desk, I had to find another twenty dollars a month in the budget.

LastWorker does not do that. You can have every person in your office on the platform for free. The chat and email support do not cost anything for humans to use. We only charge when you decide to let the AI take a swing at a message. That cost is exactly $0.04 for each reply the AI writes.

Why is the AI turned off by default?

I have seen too many businesses get excited about new technology and turn it on before they are ready. They end up sending weird, robotic messages to customers who just wanted to know if the restaurant had a high chair. It makes the business look out of touch.

We keep the AI off by default because your business should be handled by you until you decide otherwise. When you first open your account, everything is manual. You write the replies. You talk to the customers. You build your knowledge base. This costs you nothing.

I like this approach because it forces you to learn what your customers actually ask. In the restaurant group I managed, I spent weeks listening to phone calls before I ever wrote a script. I needed to hear the exact words people used. Only after I knew the patterns did I start looking for ways to speed things up.

How does the $0.04 cost work?

The pricing is simple. If the AI generates a reply for a chat message, an email, or an SMS, it costs $0.04. It does not matter if the reply is three words or three paragraphs.

If you have the AI in draft mode, it generates a suggestion for you. You look at it, maybe change a word, and hit send. That generation cost $0.04 because the machine did the work of looking up the answer and drafting the text. If you are in fully automatic mode, it still costs $0.04 per reply.

There is no monthly subscription to keep the AI active. There is no "platform fee" to access the automation. You only pay for what you use. If you have a slow month and the AI only answers ten questions, you owe forty cents.

What are the three modes of operation?

The first mode is manual. This is where most people should start. You use the shared inbox to talk to people. You use the saved replies to handle common questions. You use the tickets and the knowledge base to keep things organized. This is free. It will stay free.

The second mode is draft mode. This is the middle ground. When a customer sends a message, the AI looks at your knowledge base and writes a suggested answer. It sits there in the text box for a human to see. I recommend this for service businesses that have high stakes. If you are a plumber or a dentist, a wrong answer can cost you a lot of money. You want a human to verify the details before the message goes out.

The third mode is automatic. The AI sees the question, finds the answer in your knowledge base, and sends it immediately. This is best for simple, repetitive questions like "what are your hours" or "where do I park." It saves your team from doing the same task a hundred times a day.

How does this compare to other tools?

I have looked at the numbers for the other tools in the market. Out of twelve major competitors we track, four of them do not offer a free tier at all. If you want to use LiveChat, Front, Zendesk, or Intercom, you are paying a monthly fee per seat from day one.

Among the eight that do offer a free tier, seven of them put a cap on how many people can use it. For example, Crisp and Freshdesk limit you to two agents on their free plans. HubSpot also limits you to two users. If you have a small team of four people, you are already forced into a paid plan.

Those paid plans are not cheap. Front starts at $25 per seat. Zendesk starts their full suite at $55 per agent. If I had put my eleven dental front desk workers on Zendesk, it would have cost over $600 a month just for the seats.

At LastWorker, those eleven people can all have logins for free. You only pay the $0.04 fee if you choose to use the AI to help them. This changes the way you think about hiring and growth. You don't have to worry about the software bill doubling just because you hired a part-time receptionist for the weekends.

When should you turn on the AI?

My rule of thumb is to stay manual until it hurts. I wrote phone scripts at 2am because I was tired of hearing my staff struggle with the same three objections. I only turned those scripts into a system once I knew they worked.

You should turn on the AI when you notice your team is spending more than an hour a day answering the same five questions. You build a knowledge base article for each of those questions. Then you set the AI to draft mode.

Watch the drafts for a week. If the AI is getting the answers right 95 percent of the time, you can consider moving those specific topics to automatic. You can switch back to manual at any time if things get complicated.

What about phone calls?

The AI also handles phone calls, but the pricing is different because of the technology involved. An AI answering a phone call costs $0.01 per minute. This price includes the carrier costs.

In my experience with regional service businesses, a typical lead qualification call takes about three minutes. That means it costs about thirty cents to have the AI answer the phone, answer questions about your services, and take down the customer's information.

Compare that to a traditional answering service. I have paid those services hundreds of dollars a month, plus a fee for every single call they took. Most of the time, they just took a name and a number and sent me an email anyway. The AI can actually answer the questions using your knowledge base.

The importance of the knowledge base

The AI is only as good as the information you give it. We provide a public help center and a knowledge base for free. You should use these.

Even if you never turn on the AI, having a knowledge base is vital. It is where you store the "source of truth" for your business. When I was running a restaurant group, I had a binder with all our policies. If a guest asked about a private event, the staff looked in the binder.

LastWorker takes that binder and puts it online. The AI reads that binder to generate its replies. Because the knowledge base is free, you can take your time getting the information right without a clock ticking on a subscription.

Keeping it honest

I am not here to tell you that AI will solve every problem in your shop. It won't. There are times when a customer is angry or a situation is too complex for a machine. That is why we keep the humans in the loop.

The $0.04 fee is a fair trade for the time it saves. If it saves a receptionist five minutes of typing, it is worth four cents. But if the AI gives a bad answer because you haven't updated your knowledge base, it costs you much more than four cents in reputation.

Start manual. Get your team into the shared inbox. Use the free tools until you feel the weight of the volume. Then, and only then, try the AI. You can test it with five dollars and see exactly how many conversations it handles for you. There are no contracts to sign and no credit cards required to get started with the free human-powered tools.

In my years of running operations, I always looked for tools that scaled with me. I hated being punished for growing. LastWorker's model of $1 a month for a phone number and $0.04 for an AI reply is the first time I have seen a software company's incentives line up with a small business owner's budget. You pay for the work done, not for the number of people you have sitting in chairs.