What you will actually pay for a SIAS answering service

Special Interest Answering Service (SIAS) charges a flat rate every 4 weeks (28 days) that includes a block of operator minutes, plus a per-minute rate for minutes over the block. There is no setup fee and no contract. This page shows the plans, defines a billed minute, and shows what our customers actually paid over the last six months, so you can pick a plan without guessing.

Plans

All plans include 24/7/365 live answering by US-based operators, bilingual English and Spanish operators, message delivery by text, email or fax, call patching, emergency dispatch, and the online account portal. Minutes are use them or lose them; unused minutes do not roll over. You can change plans at any time by calling or writing in, and the change takes effect on your next billing cycle. There is no fee to change.

Prices are current as of October 26, 2026. Existing customers may be on older plans; your invoice shows yours.

What counts as a minute

A billed operator minute is time one of our operators spends working your account, not time your caller spends on the line with a recording.

You are billed for:

• Talk time while an operator is live with your caller
• Time an operator spends setting up a patch (transferring the caller to you or your on-call person)
• Outbound calls an operator places on your behalf that are not patches, such as calling you back with an emergency
• Time spent sending your messages by email
• Time spent paging or texting your on-call list

You are not billed for:

• Ring time before an operator answers
• Time your caller spends in your greeting or in queue
• Talk time after the operator connects (patches) the caller to you. Patched minutes are not billed, however long you talk.

Rounding works in your favor. We add up your operator seconds for the whole cycle and round down to the nearest whole minute. A cycle that totals 100 minutes and 59 seconds bills as 100 minutes. We never round individual calls up.

A typical answered call for a small service business uses about a minute and a half of operator time. From July 1 to October 18, 2026, our operators averaged 82 to 90 seconds of talk time per handled call across all accounts (Spectrum call records, about 248,000 call records).

What a real billing cycle looks like

These are not hypotheticals. We pulled every invoice we issued from April 27 to September 30, 2026 (1,815 billing cycles across about 311 customers on current plans) and took three points from each plan's actual usage: a quiet cycle (the median), a typical busy cycle (75th percentile) and a heavy cycle (90th percentile). The bill column is the flat rate plus the extra minutes at that plan's rate.

What this means when you choose:

• If you expect under 100 operator minutes in 4 weeks (roughly 65 to 75 answered calls at our average talk time, fewer if your calls need patching or paging), Starter is the right plan. Nearly three out of four Starter cycles had no overage at all.
• If you expect 150 to 250 minutes, Growth costs less than Starter plus overage once you pass about 160 minutes (60 extra minutes at $0.99 is $59.40, and the step up is $60).
• Business customers use their minutes: 54% of Business cycles went over, by a median of 88 minutes. If you are regularly above 500 minutes, Volume 560 at $515 is the cheaper plan, and you can move to it at any cycle boundary.
• Volume tiers (560 to 1,200 minutes) are for accounts that run several hundred to several thousand operator minutes a cycle. Their heavy cycles vary too much by account for a table to be useful; call and we will size the tier from your call volume.

Volume tiers are left out of the table because each one has fewer than 90 billing cycles behind it, too few to describe a typical cycle honestly.

Overage, in numbers

Per-minute overage is the part of answering-service pricing people worry about most, so here is ours, measured.

Three things to take from this:

1. Most cycles have no overage. On Starter, the plan most customers start on, 789 of 1,086 cycles had none.
2. When there is overage, it is usually small. The median Starter overage, among cycles that had any, was 34 minutes, or $33.66.
3. The plan ladder is wide enough. The step from Starter to Growth is $60, which is 60 extra minutes; on Starter, nine cycles in ten stayed under 49 extra minutes. If you are regularly over, moving up one plan costs less than the overage, and a plan change takes effect the next cycle.

Multi-location and property management accounts

If you manage many properties or locations, each one can have its own greeting, contact list and on-call rules under one bill. We price those accounts per portfolio: a plan from the table above for the shared minute pool, plus a per-property fee of $10 per property address per cycle that covers the separate scripting, contact list and on-call tree for each address. Every portfolio is different, so the final quote reflects your situation; where individual units generate heavy call traffic we may price per unit instead, and we tell you before that applies.

Multi-account, multi-line and loyalty discounts are applied on the invoice as separate credit lines, so you can see them.

Portfolios of 500 or more properties are quoted directly: call (815) 741-2007 or email [email protected] with the property count and the on-call structure and we will send a written quote.

Billing cycle, payment, late fees, guarantee and cancellation

Billing cycle. We bill every 4 weeks (28 days), not by calendar month, so there are 13 cycles in a year. Your invoice shows the exact period it covers. Starter at $159 every 4 weeks works out to $2,067 a year, or about $172 a calendar month; the same math applies to every plan.

What is on the invoice. One line for the plan, one line for extra operator minutes shown as a count (for example "42 Operator Minutes"), per-property fees if you have them, and any discounts as credits. There are no per-message, per-text or per-page fees.

Payment. Card or ACH through your account portal (247answering.com/pay-my-bill), or check. Invoices are due 15 days from the invoice date (net 15). Payments are applied to the oldest open balance first.

Late fees. A 3% late charge is added to any balance still open after the due date. Pay by the due date and you will never see one.

Guarantee. 14-day money-back guarantee for new accounts. If we are not a fit, tell us within 14 days of going live.

Cancellation. Cancel any time by calling or writing in. There is no contract and no cancellation fee. The plan fee for the cycle already underway is not refunded.

Setup. No setup fee. Your account is live within 24 hours of sign-up; you forward your line to the number we give you.

Pricing questions, answered

Figures on this page come from Special Interest Answering Service invoices dated April 27 to September 30, 2026. Percentiles are approximate to within a few minutes. No customer is identified.

How SIAS compares with other answering services

We put our prices next to three services people ask about most, with figures read from each company's website on October 26, 2026: SIAS vs Ruby, SIAS vs Smith.ai and SIAS vs AnswerConnect.

Related guides

For the mechanics behind these numbers, read Per-minute vs per-call answering service pricing. For what operators actually do on an emergency call, read After-hours emergency dispatch: how a live answering service handles it.