Nobody Picks Up After 8pm: 24/7 at ₹2/min

Two line items, and only two. Talk time at ₹2 a minute on Bharat Standard voice, and ₹2,000 every 30 days to keep the phone number and one concurrent line live. The number recharge is auto-debited from the same credit balance the minutes come out of, so there is one balance to watch, not a bill and a plan.

Billing is whole minutes, telecom standard. A 45-second call bills as one minute, ₹2. We would rather write that here than let you find it on an invoice.

All figures exclude GST. 18% GST applies at the point you load credits — a ₹10,000 credit load is billed ₹11,800, which is ₹10,000 usable plus ₹1,800 GST.

Read the right-hand column honestly. At 60 minutes a month the effective rate is ₹35 a minute, because you are paying ₹2,000 for a phone line you barely use. Per-minute pricing rewards volume; that is arithmetic, not marketing. The ₹2/min applies from the very first minute — no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in — but the line charge is fixed and you should price it in.

That right-hand column is also the number to hold any vendor's quote against. Keep it; the next section uses it as a test.

We are not going to give you a percentage here, and that is deliberate.

Several of the pages ranking for this question carry confident loss statistics — what share of callers supposedly never ring back, what share of after-hours calls are supposedly missed, what a missed evening call is supposedly worth. We tried to trace them. We could not find a study, a sample size or a methodology behind any of them. We are not repeating those figures here even in order to disagree with them, because a number travels further than the objection attached to it. Some of them would have helped our argument.

What is left is reasoning, and you should treat it as reasoning rather than as evidence.

An evening caller is, by definition, someone who chose to ring outside your working hours. Whether that makes them a better prospect than an 11am caller, we do not know and cannot show you. It is asserted constantly on pages selling this product, including by people selling ours. Anyone who tells you they know should be able to show you the study.

What is not in doubt is the arithmetic of a call nobody answers: it produces no record. A voicemail asks the caller to do the work twice — once to call, once to wait for you to call back. Some will. The ones who will not are indistinguishable, in your own data, from people who never called at all. That is exactly why this leak is hard to see in your numbers and easy to argue about with made-up percentages.

If you want a rupee figure for your own situation rather than for a blog's, our missed-call calculator uses your call volume and your average job value, not ours.

There is one test, and it takes ten seconds. Divide the plan price by the minutes you will actually use, add any overage, and compare the result to the effective rate in the first table at your volume. A bundle wins on cost only if it comes in under that number. At 300 evening minutes the bar is ₹8.67 a minute. At 1,000 it is ₹4.00. At 2,500 it is ₹2.80.

Here is how the published Indian rate cards do against that test. Every competitor figure below was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 21 July 2026, with the sentence it came from recorded. Rates move; re-check before you buy.

Read the 100-minute row first, because it does not flatter us. Botsense publishes ₹9 a minute with no monthly commitment, so at 100 evening minutes they come to ₹900 against our ₹2,200. Our fixed ₹2,000 line charge loses that comparison outright, and the two only cross at about 286 minutes a month. Their page does not state whether a number is included, whether prices include GST, or how part-minutes are rounded, so it is not a like-for-like total — but the direction at low volume is clear and we are not going to bury it.

Two fairness notes on the bundle columns. A buyer at 1,000 minutes would move up Agni's ladder rather than pay Starter overage: Growth is ₹5,999 for 1,000 minutes, still above ₹4,000, but nothing like ₹8,599. And Agni does publish ₹2 a minute — on the Enterprise tier, described on their own site as a volume rate at 10,000-plus minutes, and quote-only. We cannot price-check a quote, so we make no claim about it either way.

Against those two published entry tiers there is no volume at which the bundle becomes cheaper, because their overage rates are multiples of ₹2. Against a bundle we have not seen, ask two things in writing before you sign: the overage rate, and what a month busier than usual actually costs.

Every figure in this table was read on that vendor's own website on 21 July 2026 and stored with the sentence it came from. Nothing here is taken from a search snippet, an AI summary or a rival's comparison page — each of those produced at least one wrong number when we tried. Rates move; re-check before you buy.

We do not claim to be the cheapest in India and we will not. Several vendors advertise a lower headline number than ours; in the cases we checked, that number sat behind a volume tier, a quote, or a monthly plan — and as the previous section shows, at low evening volume a plain per-minute vendor with no line charge genuinely beats us. Our claim is about terms, not about being lowest: ₹2 a minute from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in.

The full sourced version, with the quoted sentence and URL behind every figure, is our India AI voice agent pricing index.

The agent answers on the number you already publish, so nothing about your listings, your board or your visiting card changes.

It answers in the language the caller opens in — 22+ Indian languages plus English — and it answers the questions people actually ask at that hour: are you open tomorrow, what does it cost, do you have a slot on Saturday, where exactly are you.

If the caller wants a slot it books one and locks it, so two evening callers cannot take the same time. A WhatsApp confirmation goes out on the spot, and a reminder goes out before the appointment.

Every enquiry is written into a lead sheet with the name, the number, what they wanted and what was said. That is what you read at 9am — not a list of missed-call notifications you now have to work through.

If a caller asks for a person, or says something outside the agent's brief, it says so plainly and escalates to your mobile or your WhatsApp rather than improvising.

And if the line drops before the agent gets there, it can ring that number back. That is your own enquiry calling your own number. We do not call bought lists or cold lists, ever, for any client.

You do not have to take our word for how it sounds. The live demo agent is the same system, answering for us, right now.

The minimum first credit load is ₹10,000, billed at ₹11,800 with 18% GST. That ₹10,000 is one balance that everything draws from.

Month 1 for a founding client, with 300 evening minutes:

Credits never expire, so the ₹2,400 is still there next month. At a zero balance everything pauses gracefully and a top-up resumes it — there is no surprise bill at the end of a month.

The free build is a trade and we state it plainly rather than in fine print: we build your agent for nothing in return for the Care Plan for your first three months at the founding rate of ₹5,000 a month, and an honest testimonial plus a short case study after you go live. The Care Plan covers monitoring, tuning the agent as you learn what callers actually ask, campaign setup help, a monthly report and priority WhatsApp support with the founder.

At the same 300 minutes, three months comes to ₹22,800 of credit debits excluding GST, and that includes a build that lists at ₹40,000.

From month 4 the Care Plan is optional. Drop it and your floor is ₹2,000 for the line plus whatever you talk — ₹2,600 a month at 300 minutes. Later top-ups start at ₹500.

A fixed plan has one real advantage and it is not a small one: you know the number before the month starts. Prepaid credits do not give you that. If you are the kind of owner who wants a single predictable line in the books and does not want to think about a balance, a bundle is genuinely the easier product, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.

On cost, a bundle is the better buy when a vendor quotes you an all-in effective rate below the one in the first table at your volume — under ₹8.67 a minute if you use 300 evening minutes, under ₹4.00 at 1,000 — and when the overage rate past the allowance is low enough that a busy month does not punish you. None of the published entry tiers we checked clears that bar. A quote we have not seen might.

And there is one shape of competitor that beats us outright at low volume, which we would rather state than have you discover: below about 286 evening minutes a month, a published per-minute rate with no line charge — Botsense's ₹9/min, for instance — costs less than our ₹2/min plus ₹2,000 for the line. We charge for the line; they do not publish one. Above that volume the ₹2 rate takes over and the gap widens fast.

Per-minute is the better buy when your evenings are busy enough to clear that crossover, when they are seasonal, or when you do not want a recurring charge running in a month where you took eleven calls.

Our honest mitigation for the budgeting weakness: set a top-up threshold, load ₹500 to ₹2,000 at a time after the first load, and look at the balance once a week. It is a real bit of admin and we are not going to pretend it is nothing.

What we will not do is charge you a monthly fee to hold the door open. There is no plan to pick, no tier to outgrow and nothing to cancel.

Keep the number that is on your board, your listings and your ads. There are two normal routes.

Conditional forwarding: your existing number forwards to the agent's line only when it is unanswered or only after your closing time, so your staff take the daytime calls exactly as they do now and the agent covers the gap. This is the usual starting point, because it changes nothing during working hours.

Full-time answering: the agent takes every call, answers what it can, and escalates the rest to your team. Businesses usually move here after a few weeks of reading the lead sheet and deciding how many daytime calls were also going unanswered.

Either way the build takes days, not months, because there is nothing to install and no hardware. Tell us what your evening callers ask and what you want the agent to do about it, and that is most of the brief.

On the legal side, inbound answering and outbound calls to your own enquiries sit in different regulatory buckets, and it is worth knowing which is which before you switch anything on. We wrote up what TRAI and DLT actually require here: Is AI calling legal in India.

If the shape of your problem is specific — a gym losing membership enquiries, a clinic losing appointment calls, a showroom losing weekend walk-in questions — tell us what it is on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750 and we will tell you what it would cost you, in these same numbers, before you commit to anything.