AC Service AI Receptionist India: ₹2/min

Every rupee that can leave your account, in one table. These are our own published figures.

What there is not

• No monthly platform or SaaS subscription.
• No per-seat fee, so adding a second person to the office costs nothing.
• No minimum monthly minutes. A quiet December bills like a quiet December.
• No annual contract on usage. Credits never expire, and at zero balance everything pauses gracefully rather than failing badly.

The honest month-one arithmetic

The founding offer has a real floor and it is better seen now than in an invoice. Your first credit load is ₹10,000 — billed ₹11,800 with GST — and everything comes out of that single balance:

₹3,000 buys about 1,500 billed minutes at ₹2/min. Be clear-eyed about what that means: your first month's real outlay is ₹11,800 including GST, not the ₹600 of call time a quiet month would consume. The number recharge and the Care Plan are debited from the same balance as your calls, which is simpler to track than three separate bills but does mean the balance moves before a single call is answered.

Full terms are on the pricing page.

Almost every AI receptionist page written for a service business assumes a roughly flat month. Air-conditioning does not have flat months, and that single fact changes which pricing model is correct for you.

The mechanism is not complicated. Demand for AC installation, gas refilling, servicing and emergency repair tracks temperature, and in most of India the hot stretch runs from around March through June before the monsoon breaks. Your phone does not ring evenly across the year; it clusters. We are not going to attach a multiplier to that, because we do not have a sourced figure for how much AC service call volume rises in an Indian summer and we are not going to borrow an unsourced one. You already know your own curve better than any statistic would tell you.

What matters is what each cost model does when the curve moves.

In the worked example later on this page, the same Dvaarik terms cost ₹8,200 in a peak month and ₹2,600 in a quiet one — the only difference between the two being the second concurrent line, added for the peak and dropped afterwards. Nothing was renegotiated. That is the whole argument for usage billing in a seasonal trade, and it is the same reason the model is a poor fit for a business whose volume is genuinely tiny all year — the fixed ₹2,000 number charge then dominates everything else.

The specific failure that costs you jobs in May

On the hottest afternoon of the year, every caller is urgent and impatient. Your office phone is already engaged because the previous caller is being talked through a slot. The new caller gets an engaged tone. Nothing obliges them to try again, and the next AC service number in the search results is one tap away. On a mobile line an engaged tone generally leaves no missed-call record, so you have no way to learn the job existed.

The direct answer to that is concurrency, not cleverness. A second concurrent line is ₹1,500 per 30 days, charged per 30 days rather than committed for a year, which means you can add it for the summer and drop it in July. That is a mundane feature, and it is the one that matters most in this trade. The same problem is covered generically in your phone is busy and customers are leaving, and the after-hours half of it in business calls after hours in India.

One scenario, set against eleven vendors. Scenario: 700 inbound calls averaging 2.5 billed minutes, plus 300 outbound AMC-renewal and callback calls averaging 2 billed minutes. Total 1,000 handled calls and 2,350 billed minutes in one month.

Every competitor figure below is traced to a rate published on that vendor's own page and recorded in our internal price ledger on 21 Jul 2026. Where a monthly total appears for a competitor, it is our arithmetic from their published plan price, included minutes and overage rate — not a quote from them. Where a total cannot be computed honestly, the cell says so rather than guessing. Competitor pricing in this market moves within weeks, so re-check any figure before you decide on it.

How to read that table without being misled by it

Four warnings, including one against us.

Against us: our ₹8,200 includes the phone number, which several of these plans also bundle and Trikon explicitly does not. If you point an existing AC service number that you already own at us, the ₹2,000 disappears and the month is ₹6,200, or ₹6.20 a call. If you compare us against Trikon you must add Trikon's separate carrier bill to their ₹11,750 to make it like-for-like, and we do not know what your carrier would charge.

On the lowest advertised numbers: the two lowest headline rates in the table above — Scalify's ₹0.40/min and Agni's ₹2/min — both sit behind conditions that are published on the vendors' own pages. Scalify's is a self-labelled estimate on top of a ₹15,000/month plan with a 10,000-minute monthly minimum. Agni's ₹2/min is their quote-only Enterprise volume rate at 10,000+ minutes, while the buyable entry is ₹2,999/month with ₹8/min overage. We are not calling that misleading and we are not claiming to be the cheapest in India — we do not know that and neither does anyone else. Our claim is narrower and checkable: ₹2/min from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in.

On GST: Dvaarik, Agni, VaniAgent and MyOperator all publish prices exclusive of 18% GST, so those rows are directly comparable. On Botsense's page we looked for a GST statement and found none. We have not verified GST treatment on every other page in the table, so ask before you compare.

On third-party numbers: several vendors in this market publish tables of each other's prices. Some of those figures contradict what the named vendor publishes about itself. Nothing in the table above is sourced from a rival's comparison page, and you should apply the same rule to any table someone shows you.

A broader version of this comparison, kept current, is in our AI voice agent price index and in AI calling agent price in India 2026.

You will meet this argument while shopping: per-minute rates are a distraction, and what you should really compare is cost per booked appointment. It is a reasonable argument, and it is also the argument a vendor makes when it does not want to publish a rate. Both things can be true at once.

Here is our position. Cost per booked job is the better business metric and the worse shopping metric, because it depends on two things the vendor does not control and cannot honestly promise: how long your calls run and what share of them convert. A vendor quoting you a cost per booked appointment has assumed both, and you usually cannot see either assumption.

So do it the other way round. Take a published per-minute rate, apply your own call length and your own conversion rate, and the cost per booked job falls out of arithmetic you own.

Worked, using our numbers and your assumptions

At the peak-month figures above — ₹8,200 for 1,000 handled calls, before the Care Plan — the cost per handled call is ₹8.20. Now apply a conversion rate. This is your number, not ours:

The honest version of the same table in a quiet month, where 150 calls cost ₹2,600 and the fixed ₹2,000 number charge dominates, is that the cost per handled call rises to ₹17.33 — and at 4 in 10 converting, ₹43.33 per booked job. We get materially more expensive per call at low volume, and we would rather show you that than average it away.

Set those against the value of one AC service or installation job in your own business. We are not going to publish an average AC repair ticket value for India, because we could not verify one and an invented figure would make this whole page worthless. You know yours. Do that division yourself; it is the only version of the calculation worth trusting.

One further thing the per-minute framing gets right in this trade specifically: a booking conversation for an AC callout is short. Make and tonnage, split or window, the symptom in the caller's words, address, and a service window. At ₹2/min a three-billed-minute booking call is ₹6 of talk time, or ₹10.47 once the peak-month fixed charges are blended in at ₹3.49 a minute. Long conversations are where per-minute billing hurts, and an AC service line does not have many of them.

You can run your own version of this on the missed-call calculator.

Described mechanically, with no performance claims attached. All names below are invented.

1. Answers every call, including at 10pm in May

The agent picks up, identifies your business by name, and works a booking script you approve. It handles all 22 scheduled Indian languages plus English and code-mixed Hinglish, Tenglish and Tanglish, switching mid-sentence rather than asking the caller to press a key for a language. Those languages are on the ₹2/min rate.

> Caller: AC is not cooling, when can someone come. > Agent: This is Cooltech Services. I can get a technician to you tomorrow between 11am and 1pm, or Thursday between 9am and 11am. Which suits you. > Caller: Tomorrow. > Agent: Holding tomorrow 11am to 1pm. Is it a split or a window unit, and roughly what tonnage.

2. Captures what the technician needs before he leaves the workshop

This is the part that is meant to save a wasted trip. The agent collects, in the caller's own words: unit type and tonnage, brand and model if the caller knows it, the symptom as described rather than as diagnosed, whether the unit is under AMC or warranty, the full address with a landmark, floor and lift access, and whether someone will be home in the window. That goes to you as a structured note before the van moves.

3. Stops before diagnosis, every time

The agent does not tell a caller their gas has leaked, their compressor has gone, or their PCB needs replacing. It does not quote a repair price for a unit nobody has looked at, and it does not commit to a technician arriving in an hour because dispatch, not the phone, decides that.

The wording of every refusal is yours to sign off. What is not configurable is whether it can invent a diagnosis. It cannot, under any configuration.

4. Calls your own AMC list before the season, not during it

Annual maintenance contracts and pre-summer service reminders are the natural outbound job in this trade, and the whole point is to do them in February, not in the second week of May when your technicians are already saturated. You supply the list from your own records. The agent calls within the hours you set, identifies your business, states why it is calling, and books a slot or logs the outcome as call-back, not interested, or no answer.

The rule that is not negotiable: we call only your own customers and your own enquiries. No purchased lists, no scraped numbers, no cold databases, ever. A customer who says stop is marked and not called again by that campaign. See outbound calls.

5. Chases the ad enquiry before it goes cold

If you run Google or Meta ads for AC installation, the agent can call a new lead back within about 60 seconds of the form landing. That is a different job from answering the phone. Covered properly in speed to lead and ad leads going cold.

6. Takes a deposit where a no-show costs you a van

For installations or for jobs where the technician travels a distance, the agent can send a payment link mid-conversation and confirm the slot on receipt. We take no commission on what you collect. See payments.

7. Confirms and reminds on WhatsApp

Service window confirmations and morning-of reminders go out on WhatsApp from your own number. Those message fees are billed by Meta directly to your own Meta account, with zero markup from us.

We are not going to tell you what any of this does to your no-show rate or your booking rate. We do not have those figures for AC service businesses in India and will not borrow someone else's unsourced ones. Measure it over one season; that is the only number worth having.

The peak month on its own flatters usage billing. Here is the whole year, using the same two months already worked out: three peak months at 2,350 billed minutes each, nine quieter months at 300 billed minutes each. The second concurrent line is added for the three peak months only and dropped after.

The year, added up

Total billed minutes across the year: 9,750. So the true blended rate is ₹6.46 per billed minute in year one and ₹4.92 in year two — not ₹2. That gap is the ₹2,000 monthly number charge spread across nine months when you barely use it, and it is the single most important honest fact on this page.

If you point an existing number you already own at us, the ₹24,000 of number recharges disappears. Year two becomes ₹24,000 for 9,750 billed minutes — ₹2.46 per billed minute, which is close to the headline rate because at that point you are only paying for talk time and the seasonal second line.

So the practical advice, plainly: if you already have a working AC service number that customers know and that appears on your van and your Google listing, keep it and point it at us. You will pay roughly half. If you need us to provide a number, budget the ₹2,000 per 30 days as a fixed line and stop thinking of yourself as a ₹2/min customer, because you are not one until your volume is high enough for it to disappear into the average.

Compare this against the same maths for a salaried person in should I hire a receptionist or use AI.

Usually yes on the money at the volumes above, but the comparison people actually want is more specific than that, and it deserves an honest treatment rather than a flattering one.

We are not publishing a salary figure here. Office-assistant and receptionist pay for an AC service business varies enormously between a metro and a district town, self-reported salary data skews toward organised metro employers, and we could not verify a figure specific to this trade. An invented number would make the whole comparison worthless, so instead: take what you actually pay or would pay, add PF, ESI and bonus where applicable, add the cost of cover during leave, and compare that annual figure against the ₹48,000 in the table above. That subtraction is a minute's work and it is yours, not ours.

What we can compare without inventing anything is what each option does.

The honest conclusion is not that you should stop employing anyone. It is that these two are bad substitutes and good complements. Your person is most valuable dealing with the angry repeat-visit customer and coordinating technicians in real time. The agent is most valuable on the second line at 2pm in May, at 10pm on a Sunday, and on the AMC list nobody will otherwise work.

The generic version of this argument is in AI receptionist vs a human answering service.

Five situations where a competitor or a person genuinely serves an AC service business better than we do. The rest of this page is only credible if this section is honest.

1. You run field-service or dispatch software

This is our clearest gap. If your jobs live in a field-service management or dispatch system that assigns technicians, tracks van routes and holds service history per unit, we have no integration with it. Our booking is calendar and WhatsApp based with slot-locking. That fits an AC service business running on a WhatsApp group, a diary and a shared Google Calendar, and it fits badly if someone would have to retype every booking from our calendar into your dispatch system. In that case we are creating work, not removing it. Buy from a vendor that integrates with your system.

2. Your volume is genuinely small all year

The year-one arithmetic above blends to ₹6.46 a billed minute, because of the fixed ₹2,000 monthly number charge. If you take thirty calls a month in the quiet season and a hundred in the peak, that charge will dominate everything and our headline rate becomes almost meaningless to you. Either point an existing number at us so the charge disappears, or accept that a low-volume month with us is priced like a low-volume month, not like a bargain.

3. You need heavy simultaneous capacity across several cities

Our default is one number and one concurrent line, with extra lines at ₹1,500 per 30 days. That scales to a handful of lines, not to a call centre. If May means ten calls landing at once across four branches with an uptime guarantee attached, buy from a company with a support rota and an SLA. We are one engineer.

4. You need to see proof it worked at a comparable business

We have no AC service case study and no published outcome figures, because founding seats are still open and we have a hard rule against publishing proof we do not have. Ours is a page without testimonials or percentages, and that is a real disadvantage at the point of decision. The only counter we have is that you can call the live demo agent yourself and judge the thing directly rather than judge a screenshot. Try it from the pilot page.

5. You want one round monthly number with no arithmetic

A ₹9,999-a-month plan is easier to approve and easier to forecast than prepaid credits with a ₹10,000 first load, a number recharge, a seasonal second line and an optional Care Plan. Our model wins on total cost at the volumes worked above, and it loses on cognitive simplicity. If you want a fixed line item and zero variability, a flat plan is a legitimate choice even at a higher effective rate. Predictability has a price and it is fine to pay it.

If none of those five apply, the case for us is short: a published rate that starts at the first minute, no subscription, and a refusal to invent a diagnosis on your behalf.

Take this list to us and to everyone else. The answers separate vendors faster than a demo does.

1. What is your per-minute rate in rupees, on a page I can read, and does it apply from the first minute or only above a volume threshold. Several published "from ₹X/min" rates in this market are volume-gated enterprise rates — two of them are named in the table above.
2. Is there a monthly plan I must buy before the per-minute rate applies, and what does it cost. Ask directly. Six of the ten competitors in the table above require one.
3. What is the minimum monthly volume or commitment. One vendor's published minimum engagement exceeds a whole peak AC month in the scenario on this page.
4. Is billing per second or per whole minute. Ours is whole minutes and we say so. Short booking calls round up.
5. Is the phone number included, or billed separately, or do I bring my own carrier. This single answer moves the effective rate more than the headline rate does.
6. What does month one cost before a single call is answered — setup, plan fee, number, onboarding, minimum load.
7. Are your prices inclusive or exclusive of GST. Several India pages do not say.
8. What happens when the caller asks why their AC is not cooling. Ask for the literal script. Any agent that ventures a diagnosis is a liability on a service line.
9. How many calls can it answer at once, what does each extra line cost, and can I add and remove one seasonally.
10. Does it write into my dispatch or field-service software, or into a calendar. Ask for the specific system name.
11. Where do WhatsApp message fees land — on your invoice with a markup, or on my own Meta account.
12. Will you ever call numbers I did not give you. The only acceptable answer is no.
13. Every statistic on your website — which business, over what period, measured how. If it cannot be sourced, discount the page. That test applies to this page too.

More context in best AI voice agent platforms in India 2026 and the FAQ.