A human receptionist works one eight-hour shift; the calls you lose arrive in the other sixteen.

A receptionist is a monthly salary that buys one eight-hour shift, five or six days a week, plus statutory costs, leave cover and re-hiring when they move on. Dvaarik's AI is ₹2 per minute of actual conversation plus ₹2,000 per 30 days for the phone number, both drawn from prepaid credits. At 300 answered minutes a month that is ₹2,600 ex-GST once the founding Care Plan period ends. The two are not the same product though: the salary buys walk-in coverage, judgement and empathy that per-minute billing does not.

At normal small-business call volumes, yes, by a wide margin — whatever you pay per month, subtract the ₹2,000 number recharge and divide by ₹2 to see how many minutes of AI conversation the same money buys. From month four, once the Care Plan is optional, a ₹15,000 monthly cost buys 6,500 minutes, which is around 2,170 three-minute calls. In the first three months the required ₹5,000 Care Plan comes out of the same balance, so the same ₹15,000 buys 4,000 minutes, or about 1,330 calls. But cheaper is the wrong reason to do it. The right reason is that the AI covers the nights, Sundays, lunch hours and simultaneous callers a single shift structurally cannot, and those are the calls that were being lost.

₹2/min is the Bharat Standard rate covering the 22 scheduled Indian languages plus English, billed per minute from your credits, with the conversation, understanding and actions all included. Billed on top: ₹2,000 per 30 days for the phone number, ₹1,500 a month for each extra concurrent line, ₹750 a month for an extra number, and ₹0.10/min if you want call recording. Studio HD voices are ₹3/min, Global with 99 languages is ₹4–5/min, and Ultra realtime is ₹10/min. WhatsApp messages are billed by Meta directly to your own account with zero markup from us.

There is no subscription, no plan and no tier. The one recurring commitment is the Care Plan at the founding rate of ₹5,000 a month, required for the first three months and optional from month four. All Dvaarik prices are quoted exclusive of GST, and 18% GST applies at the point of loading credits, so a ₹10,000 credit load is billed ₹11,800 — ₹10,000 usable plus ₹1,800 GST. The minimum first credit load is ₹10,000; month one debits ₹2,000 for the number and ₹5,000 for the Care Plan, leaving roughly ₹3,000 for usage. After that, top up from ₹500 whenever you like. Credits never expire, and at a zero balance everything pauses gracefully rather than producing a surprise invoice.

No, and we will say so on the call if that is what you are asking. Almost nobody we work with removes their front desk. The arrangement that works is a split: your receptionist keeps the counter, the walk-ins, the regulars and the decisions, and the AI takes the overflow, the after-hours calls, the Sundays, the festival days and their leave period. If your calls are few and your customers mostly walk in, hiring well is the better investment and an agent will not fix much.

Greet a walk-in, hand over a file, manage a physical queue, and read a room. They can tell in three seconds that someone is frightened or about to leave, and change what they say. They make exceptions your policy never anticipated and take responsibility for them. On a customer's worst day, a patient human voice does something no script reproduces. The AI is instructed to escalate all of that to you rather than improvise, which is the correct behaviour, not a limitation we are hiding.

A booking, enquiry or appointment call typically runs about three minutes, so 100 calls a month is roughly 300 minutes and ₹600 of talk time. A clinic answering 400 calls a month lands near 1,200 minutes, or ₹2,400. The simplest way to estimate is to check your current missed-call count for one week and multiply by four, since those are the calls the AI is being hired to catch. Because billing is per minute from credits, a quiet month simply costs less.

Agents go live in days, not months — we build it, train it on your services, prices and rules, connect your number and channels, and test with real calls while you listen. Custom setup is ₹40,000 and is free for our 10 founding clients, in return for keeping the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate of ₹5,000 a month and giving an honest testimonial and short case study after go-live. From month four the Care Plan is optional. Before committing anything, message the live Dvaarik agent and try to break it.