AI Receptionist for Restaurants: What to Charge

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Charge $299 a month per location for an AI receptionist that answers a restaurant's phone. Slang, which already sells this job to dining rooms, lists its Core plan starting at $399 per location, so the $299 retainer sits $100 under that published starting price.

If the restaurant wants the phone system in its own accounts instead of your monthly retainer, Michael Heredia deploys an AI receptionist on the buyer's number for $8,000 once, with the Twilio line and voice usage billed to the buyer rather than wrapped into another subscription. You take the other path when you want the $299 to keep arriving: the agent runs in your Retell account, and the restaurant pays you for the coverage.

The buyer is the independent dining room that loses the phone while the host is seating a full room, not a software firm shopping for a platform. The same dollar-retainer shape shows up across other AI Income & Cash Flow offers: a US business pays in dollars, and the tool bill stays small only if the agent is forbidden from promising a table it cannot see.

Who pays for a restaurant phone host?

Independent full-service restaurants, and small groups that still think in locations, are the buyers with a published price already on the table. Slang's pricing page sells Core from $399 per location and lists a next starting price of $599 per location, with separate CAD $399 and AUD $399 starting prices. Slang also states, as its own claim, that the product is in 2,000-plus full-service restaurants and was built on 35 million-plus calls. Treat those counts as the vendor's marketing, then use the price card, which is the part a buyer can check.

Slang's Core list includes reservation management, text confirmations, and integrations with OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, and Resy. That is a finished booking product. Your first offer is narrower, and it should say so in the first conversation. You answer overflow and after-hours calls, collect the party size, time, name, and callback number, and text the manager. You do not write a reservation into OpenTable on day one, because a raw voice account does not include that partnership.

Where to test demand before you buy minutes

Pick one city where you already know a few dining rooms, or where friends can introduce a general manager. Write the offer in the restaurant's words: after-hours and overflow phone coverage, $299 a month, one location, manager texted with every request, no live table confirmation. To see whether that sentence gets a reply, post it as a free listing on Brixaz and notice which cities write back. Listings there are free, and a quiet listing is a cheaper lesson than a year of unused minutes.

What is the host allowed to say?

The agent may give hours, the neighborhood, the party-size maximum the manager wrote down, and the path for a private-event inquiry. It may take a name, a phone number, a party size, and a requested time. It may not confirm that a table is free, quote a price that is not in the approved notes, or promise that a dish is safe for an allergy.

That limit is the whole product. Guests call because a person is not free. If the voice invents a 7:30 for four, the restaurant wears the mistake at the door and you wear it on the invoice. Slang can push a booking into the reservation system because that integration is part of what the $399 plan is selling. Until you have the same connection, the honest sentence on the call is that the host stand will confirm.

The script you freeze before the first live call

• Greeting uses the restaurant's name and says the call may be recorded, without claiming that sentence satisfies every state's consent rule.
• Hours, cuisine, and the largest party the dining room will take come only from notes the manager approved.
• A reservation request ends with "the host will confirm," never with "you're booked."
• Allergies, corkage, and tonight's specials transfer to a person or go into the manager text as a question, not an answer.
• A caller who asks for a manager gets a transfer. On Retell, the AI voice fee stops once the call is transferred, and the telephony fee continues for the rest of that call.

A med-spa front desk fails in a different place: the appointment length and the room, which is the constraint in the med spa receptionist workflow. A dining room fails on seats and turns. Write the restaurant's constraint into the script the same way, or the voice will smooth it over.

What does one location cost to run?

Use Retell's pay-as-you-go plan for the first dining room. It starts at $0, lists voice rates from $0.07 to $0.31 per minute, and includes 20 concurrent calls before extra concurrency is $8 per call per month. One restaurant will not touch that cap. Vapi's Pro package, priced at 10% of hosting with a $999 monthly minimum, is a later problem, not a starter bill.

The starter minute on Retell is the sum of the lines you actually switch on. Voice infrastructure is $0.055, a Retell platform voice is $0.015, GPT 5.1 on the standard tier is $0.04, and United States telephony on Twilio is $0.015. Add the knowledge-base charge of $0.005 per minute so the agent reads the restaurant's notes instead of guessing. Those five lines add to $0.130 per minute. Drop the knowledge base and the same stack is $0.125. The first 10 knowledge bases have no monthly fee; another one is $8 a month.

Line item	Published price	What it changes
Retell pay-as-you-go	$0 to start; $0.07–$0.31 per minute	20 concurrent calls included
Starter minute (platform voice, GPT 5.1, US Twilio, knowledge base)	$0.130 per minute	$0.125 without the knowledge-base add-on
Retell phone number	$2 per month	Custom numbers are not charged this fee
Retell SMS	$20 per month plus $0.01 per message	Custom-carrier SMS skips the $20 subscription
Vapi, no success package	$0.05 per minute hosting, plus listed model ranges	$5 credits, 1 number, 4 concurrent calls, 14-day retention
Vapi speech lines before transport	$0.0818–$0.1289 per minute	Transport is extra and billed by the carrier, with no dollar amount on Vapi's pricing page
Slang Core	Starting at $399 per location	Includes reservation integrations your first build does not have
Stripe domestic cards	2.9% + 30¢ per successful charge	No monthly fee on standard pricing

Data note: Retell, Vapi, Slang, and Stripe prices were read on 18 October 2026. Voice rates move when you change the model.

Why the cheap minute is not the whole bill

Retell charges to the nearest second across the month, not by rounding each call up. Silence and hold still count, because speech-to-text stays on while the guest thinks. A call that never connects is not billed. A voicemail is billed only while the agent is on the line. Those rules matter more than shaving a fraction of a cent off the model: a chatty prompt and a long hold will move the invoice faster than swapping GPT 5.1 ($0.04 a minute standard, $0.08 fast) for a neighboring model.

Vapi is the comparison when you want the hosting line itemized at $0.05 per minute. Its pricing page lists Deepgram at $0.0095 to $0.0099, OpenAI at $0.0077 to $0.0452, and ElevenLabs at $0.0146 to $0.0238. Adding the low ends to the hosting fee gives $0.0818 per minute, and adding the high ends gives $0.1289, both before transport. Vapi says the carrier charges that transport, and the page did not publish a transport price on the day this was checked. Keep the worked example on Retell, where the US telephony line is a number you can add.

What should you charge, and what is left?

Invoice $299 per location per month, one dining room, month-to-month after the first 30 days. That is $100 under Slang Core's $399 starting price and well under the $599 starting price on the same page. You are not matching Slang's OpenTable booking. You are selling the calls that currently die while plates are going out, at a price a general manager can compare with the product they have already been pitched.

Say one restaurant pays that $299, the agent is connected for 400 minutes, and you send the manager 200 texts. Those volumes are a hypothetical, so you can see the bill, not a claim about a real dining room. Voice at $0.130 is $52. The Retell number is $2. The SMS subscription is $20, and 200 messages at $0.01 are $2. Tools for the month are $76.

Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30¢ on a successful domestic card payment and does not add a monthly fee on standard pricing. Its pricing policy rounds each fee to the nearest cent, so 2.9% of $299 ($8.671) plus 30¢ is $8.971, which rounds to $8.97. Have the restaurant pay that card invoice, or pay a US business account at Mercury, so the retainer arrives in dollars while you are living somewhere else. This margin assumes a domestic card. A foreign card is a different Stripe rate, and it is not the rate used here.

The tax that still applies after you move

Living abroad does not turn this retainer into untaxed income. The United States taxes citizens and resident aliens on worldwide income, and the foreign earned income exclusion can reduce income tax on foreign earned self-employment income without reducing self-employment tax. IRS Topic 554 sets that tax at 12.4% for Social Security plus 2.9% for Medicare, 15.3% combined, once net earnings are $400 or more. Generally, 92.35% of net self-employment earnings is the amount subject to the tax, and you deduct half of the self-employment tax when you figure adjusted gross income.

On this hypothetical, treat the $214.03 as the only profit and ignore every other expense. Then 92.35% is $197.656705, and 15.3% of that is $30.24 after rounding to the cent. Half of that tax, $15.12, is the adjustment Topic 554 describes. For 2026, Topic 751 (updated 24 September 2026) caps the Social Security portion at $184,500 of wages and self-employment earnings; the Social Security Administration's 2026 fact sheet states the same cap and the same 12.4% and 2.9% self-employed rates. This example is far under that cap, and under the extra 0.9% Medicare thresholds of $200,000 single or $250,000 married filing jointly. The exclusion-versus-self-employment trap for freelancers is laid out in the self-employment tax guide. This paragraph is the shape of the bill, not a filing position.

How do you turn the first dining room on?

Do the boring pass before you buy the number. Sit with the manager, or on a call, and write down hours, the party-size cap, the questions staff are tired of repeating, and the questions that must go to a person. Slang tells its own customers that its setup takes less than 30 minutes of restaurant time. Yours will take longer, because you are loading notes by hand and you are not connecting OpenTable.

Step	Do this	Stop if
1. Freeze the facts	One page: hours, address landmarks, max party, what the voice must never confirm.	The manager cannot answer the party-size question.
2. Build the agent	Retell pay-as-you-go, platform voice, GPT 5.1 standard, one knowledge base, US telephony.	You are tempted to turn on a fast-tier model "just to try" at $0.08 a minute.
3. Buy the line	A Retell number at $2 a month. The restaurant forwards unanswered calls, or publishes this number for overflow only.	They insist you port the main line in week one.
4. Text one person	Turn on Retell SMS at $20 a month. Texts go to the manager number in the contract.	Someone asks you to text guests a promo.
5. Simulate, then shadow	Run Retell's included call simulations. Listen to the first live transcripts yourself.	A simulated call ends with "you're booked."
6. Invoice	Stripe invoice for $299, domestic card, or a transfer into the Mercury account.	You start work with no card on file.

Keep the main published number in the restaurant's hands until a week of transcripts sounds boring. Boring is the goal. Porting the only line guests know, before you have heard a Friday, is how a bad prompt becomes the whole business for a night.

What breaks on a Saturday night?

The tool bill is rarely the failure. The failure is a confident sentence that was not in the notes. A guest asks whether the patio is open in the rain, the knowledge base is silent, and the model fills the gap. The fix is a transfer or a manager text, plus a line in the script that missing facts are questions. Retell's knowledge-base fee of half a cent a minute is cheaper than a table you confirmed by accident.

Recording is the other early argument. The FCC's guide on recording calls says the Commission has no rules for individuals recording telephone conversations, and that some state laws prohibit it. Intrastate wireline recording can be a state-law problem, which is why the greeting is not a legal shield you invented. Agree with the restaurant, in writing, on whether calls are recorded, and do not turn recording on until they accept that state rules still apply.

The host stand ignores the text

Twenty concurrent calls will not save you if nobody reads the message during the rush. Put a response rule in the offer you control: during posted service, a named manager acknowledges the text, and if they do not, the product is message-taking rather than a promise of a fast confirm. Say that out loud before you charge $299. A second location is a copy of the notes and another $2 number, not a new company, but only after the first dining room has lived through a Saturday with the rule in place.

Start with one dining room

The searchable price is $299 a month per location, set $100 under the $399 Slang lists for Core, and the tool stack that supports a hypothetical 400-minute month is $76 on Retell before the $8.97 card fee. What you sell is the request, the manager text, and a voice that will not invent a table. Add a second location only after the first Saturday's transcripts match the script you froze.

Sources checked

• Slang pricing — Core from $399 per location, next starting price $599, reservation integrations, vendor claims, setup FAQ. Checked 18 October 2026.
• Retell pricing — per-minute components, phone number, SMS, concurrency, billing rules. Checked 18 October 2026.
• Vapi pricing — hosting, model ranges, credits, concurrency, Pro minimum. Checked 18 October 2026.
• Stripe pricing and Stripe pricing policy — 2.9% + 30¢ and nearest-cent rounding. Checked 18 October 2026.
• IRS Topic 554, IRS Topic 751, SSA 2026 update, and the foreign earned income exclusion.
• FCC call-recording guide and FCC unwanted communications.
• Michael Heredia pricing, checked 18 October 2026, linked above.