Your cell rings first. The AI only picks up if you don't.
A real US number — local, toll-free, or a vanity 1-833-YOURNAME — that rings your own phone, then your crew, then answers in the words you wrote. The routing is plain TwiML that runs before the AI exists: a call you answer never opens the model at all.
Parsons Phone is a business phone number and phone system for small business: a local, toll-free or vanity number, call routing that rings your cell then your crew, a business voicemail that arrives already read, and business texting — for $3.99 a month plus 3¢ a minute, on a $15 plan that covers every Parsons app. When nobody picks up, the line hands off to an AI receptionist you describe in plain English — that part is Parsons Assistants; this page is the phone.
$3.99/mo for a local number · $4.99/mo toll-free · $0.03/min
on a Parsons plan — $15/mo or $150/yr. 14-day free trial, cancel any time.
You're under a sink. The phone is in the truck.
You are not shopping for an AI receptionist. You want the phone answered. The AI is a concession you are making to physics — and every page in this category sells you the robot as the hero instead of admitting that.
You forwarded your line to your cell and your carrier's voicemail ate the call. The customer heard your personal greeting.
You priced an answering service. $300 a month for 30 calls is ten dollars a message, and half of them were robocalls.
You tried an AI one. It talked over people. Callers hung up — and it still billed you for the call.
The quote was per user, plus a number, plus a registration fee, plus a monthly campaign fee, plus AI credits. The advertised price was the smallest line on the invoice.
You already have a phone you like. You do not want a second app and a second inbox to check at the end of the day.
Every AI receptionist we priced answers before you get the chance.
Not because they are careless — because of where the meter is. Quo bills per AI-handled call, Smith.ai bills per call, Ruby bills per minute of a human's time — so in every one of them the revenue goes up when the machine takes the call instead of you. Ours is $0.03 a minute, and it is the same $0.03 whether your cell is ringing or the receptionist is talking. One metric covers both. Nothing here has a reason to intercept your call.
AI at the front door
billed per AI-handled call, or out of a credit pool
AI at the back door
$0.03/min — the same rate either way
The routing engine is pure TwiML evaluated at the carrier edge. A forwarded call never opens the model socket — so a call you answered yourself costs the same $0.03 a minute as one the receptionist took. There is no separate AI charge, because there was no AI on it.
Say it in English. It runs as a phone system.
Up to ten rules, up to six steps each. Toggle the steps below and watch the same object render three ways — the sentence the console shows you, the payload set_routing actually stores, and the message you would send an agent to get there without opening anything.
{}Every chip above is a real step or match condition in the routing engine — forward · ring_group · menu · assistant · voicemail · reject, matched on hours · callers · until. There are no others, and the page will not show you one that doesn't exist.
Your carrier's voicemail doesn't get to eat a business call.
When we forward a call to your cell, the phone that answers hears "call from your business line — press 1 to accept" before the caller is connected. A voicemail box cannot press 1. So if your cell is off, flat, or in a basement, the call keeps travelling down your chain instead of dying inside a personal greeting the customer was never meant to hear.
Forward timeouts are yours to set, 5 to 120 seconds. Whisper is a flag on the forward step, so it applies to a single cell or to every phone in a ring group.
The voicemail arrives already read.
Recorded, transcribed on our own stack, and emailed to you with the words in the body — so you triage from the notification without playing anything. It is playable in the console inbox too, through an authenticated proxy, because the raw carrier recording URL needs credentials your browser doesn't have.
If the transcription fails, you still get the email telling you there's a voicemail. It degrades to useful rather than to silence.
Voicemail minutes are never billed and never capped. They are recorded as usage so a voicemail flood shows up as a number you can read, not as a charge you have to dispute.
It says what you wrote. It doesn't guess your prices.
There is no training and no knowledge base — not here and not anywhere on the platform. An assistant is a system prompt you write plus the tools you grant it. It is instructed never to invent a price, a lead time, an availability or a commitment, which is exactly what you want from something answering as your business. If it should know your Thursday availability, give it the tool that knows.
"Kitchen sink's backing up — can someone come Thursday?"
There is no calendar product on Parsons. A booking becomes a CRM contact or a task, and you confirm the time. We would rather say that here than have you find out on a Thursday.
Ring ten phones at once. First one to pick up wins.
A ring group fires every number on the same frame — not round-robin, not sequential. Whoever accepts first gets the call and the other nine stop ringing in the same instant. Underneath it: a one-level menu, business hours with a real IANA timezone that wraps across midnight, a caller allowlist and blocklist, a busy-signal step, and a until timestamp for the "just for today" override.
America/New_York · wraps midnight
Missed-call text-back fires when the whole chain goes unanswered — up to 320 characters, in your words. Per-call length has a hard ceiling you set, defaulting to 9 minutes.
Local, toll-free, or 1-833-PARSONS.
Bought inside the product against live carrier inventory, in your project's own isolated carrier subaccount, with the voice and SMS webhooks wired at purchase. The search field takes letters as well as digits — so you can go looking for your own name in the keypad.
Already have a business number?
Keep it and forward it. The console ships the actual carrier codes —
*71 on Verizon, **004*<number># on GSM carriers — so
"forward when unanswered" takes about two minutes and nothing else about your line changes.
We cannot port a number in. There is no porting mechanism here, and we would rather say
so than let you find out mid-switch.
Toll-free prefixes available: 800 · 888 · 877 · 866 · 855 · 844 · 833. Filter local search by area code, by digit pattern, or by whether the number can carry SMS. Numbers ride your subscription as a monthly rider — never a prepaid balance, so an empty balance can never quietly cost you the number.
A failed monthly rent gets a 7-day grace period and an email before anything is released — and releasing works even on a lapsed plan.
The carrier paperwork, filed for you — including the rejection.
Legal business texting in the US means a business profile and then one of two lanes. Both are tools here, not a support ticket. The most commonly cited rejection cause in the industry is an opt-in page carriers won't accept — so we host one for you, inbound-first, which is the right consent model for a line people text first. If it comes back rejected, the same tool edits and resubmits.
Toll-free lane
10DLC lane
$3.99/mo on a low-volume campaign, $11.99/mo on a standard use case. If the monthly leg goes 7 days unfunded the campaign is deactivated at the carrier — a cost stop, not a surprise invoice.
Once it clears, the same number can hold a voice binding and an sms binding pointed at two different assistants — a receptionist for calls, a different one for texts. STOP and HELP are honoured unconditionally by the runtime, ahead of any assistant logic, and the opt-out list is per project.
The daily ceiling matches the sole-proprietor carrier cap. On a hit, the assistant stops replying until midnight UTC — while STOP and START keep working, because compliance is not something a rate limit gets to switch off.
24 tools. Buying the number is one of them.
Phone is not a web app with an API bolted on the side. The whole lifecycle is tool-shaped, so Claude or ChatGPT can search inventory, buy the number, bind it, rewrite the routing, read the call log and send a text — without you opening the console at all. Purchases still require an explicit confirmation and are pre-gated against your spend cap.
as published 2026-08-22. We are not the only phone product with MCP; we are the one where buying and routing the number are tools.
One month. One toll-free number. 90 minutes answered.
The same month, four ways, at published prices. Ours is itemised from our own price sheet. Theirs is itemised from their pricing pages on the date below, and every page is linked underneath so you can check us.
Parsons Phone
Quo Starter
Smith.ai Starter
Ruby Starter
Rival figures are published list prices on month-to-month billing, read off their own pricing pages and re-checked 2026-08-22 — check them yourself: quo.com/pricing · smith.ai/pricing/receptionists · ruby.com/pricing. We have no logo wall, no star ratings and no testimonials, because we have not earned them yet. Specifics are the only proof a product in beta is entitled to.
Four gates open before the AI does.
Telecom is the category where a bug becomes an invoice. Every inbound call passes four checks before the media stream opens, so a runaway stops at your plan's ceiling instead of becoming an invoice. Three of them fail closed. The fourth deliberately fails open, because an infrastructure blip should never drop a real customer.
Carrier signature
Verified against the exact URL given at purchase, with the subaccount's own token.
fails closedEntitlement
The number's owner must hold an active line. Dunning grace is honoured, so a paying customer is never cut mid-retry.
fails closedMonthly minutes
Checked before any media opens, so an over-cap line incurs no further cost — to you or to us.
phone_minutes 120/120Toll-fraud velocity
Per-project rate and concurrency ceiling. This one fails open on an internal error — a real caller matters more.
fails open, on purposeThis line has reached its monthly limit. Goodbye.
And if our primary path ever fails, the caller does not get a carrier error tone. A deliberately dumb fallback — no database, no lookup — plays one apology and asks them to call back in a few minutes. Degrading to a human sentence is a feature we wrote on purpose.
Things this doesn't do.
Two columns, deliberately the same length. If something in the right column is the thing you actually need, buy something else — we would genuinely rather you did than have you cancel in week three.
Ships today
Doesn't exist
No sale in this section. It is here because you will find all of it out anyway,
and it costs less to say it now.
$15 a month. Not for the phone — for the whole platform.
The subscription is not this product's price. It is the account's access fee, and this product is one of more than twenty behind it. The parts with a real vendor cost — a number, a voice minute, an outbound text — are priced separately and visibly, at cost plus a published margin, with the formula printed a few inches below. A price that shows its own arithmetic is harder to distrust than one that just says "affordable".
- 120 voice minutes a month — the default ceiling, yours to adjust; minutes meter at $0.03, receptionist and forwarded alike
- 25 phone numbers, counted across every project on your account
- $0 inbound texts — metered, never billed
- $0 voicemail minutes — metered, never billed
- ∞ MCP tool calls — metered, never billed
| Plan allowance | Included | Product |
|---|---|---|
| phone_minutes | 120 | Phone |
| phone_numbers | 25 | Phone |
| emails_sent | 200 a day | |
| messages_email | 200 | Notifications |
| crm_contacts | 50,000 | CRM |
| tasks | 10,000 | Tracker |
| storage_gb | 5 | Storage |
| db_gb | 1 | Database |
| app_requests | 1,000,000 | Deploy |
| fires | 20,000 | Scheduler |
| bank_connections | 2 | Money |
| radar_checks | 100,000 | Radar |
| monthly active users | uncapped | Auth |
| MCP tool calls | uncapped | MCP Hub |
| apps deployed · databases | uncapped | Deploy · Database |
| inbound SMS · voicemail minutes | uncapped | Phone |
Every row above is included in the subscription with one exception: phone_minutes is a monthly ceiling, not a free allowance — voice minutes meter at $0.03 each from the first one, and the line stops at the ceiling rather than billing past it. Going past any other included amount is welcome: it draws from prepaid credits at roughly cost-and-a-half, so building stays free inside the allowances and the bill starts when real usage does.
the price is stored per number at purchase, so a future reprice never changes what you already pay
Unlimited projects. No extra cost.
A project is its own world — its own number, its own routing, its own call log, its own members and its own spend cap. Run the trade in one, the side thing in another, and your personal line in a third. One bill spans all of them. $15 is the account, however many people and projects sit on it — no charge per seat, none per workspace. Quo bills per user: every seat you add is another $19 on their bill.
4 rules · 2 members
1 rule · 1 member
own spend cap
The 25-number allowance is counted account-wide, across every project — so extra projects give you isolation, not a way to multiply the allowance. We would rather that be on the page than in a surprise.
The things people actually ask.
Can I keep my existing number?
By forwarding it, yes — the console ships the carrier codes (*71, **004*<number>#). We cannot port a number in.
Does it ring my actual cell phone?
Yes — put a forward step first in your chain and there is no app to install. Your cell rings the way it always has.
What if I'm already on another call?
It falls to the next step in your chain — the crew, the menu, voicemail, or the receptionist. You choose the order.
Will callers know it's an AI?
They will know they are not talking to you. It does not pretend to be a person and it cannot transfer them to one — which is precisely why the chain rings you first.
What does a busy month cost?
Voice meters at $0.03 a minute, so the default 120-minute ceiling caps voice at $3.60 on top of the $15 and the number. Past the ceiling the line tells callers it has reached its limit rather than billing you more — and the ceiling is yours to adjust in the billing console.
Can I text customers?
Yes, once carrier registration clears. Outbound segments are $0.02; inbound texts are free and never billed.
Can I get an 800 number?
Yes — 800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844 and 833, at $4.99/mo, and you can search them for letters.
Do I need to know what a webhook is?
No. Voice and SMS webhooks are wired at purchase. You never see them.
Is $15 worth it for a phone line?
On its own, no — a dedicated phone app costs less, and the receipts above say so instead of hiding it. The $15 buys the account, not the line: every Parsons product, unlimited projects, nothing per seat and nothing per workspace, so a second person or a second business adds nothing. Consumption is itemised, prepaid and capped, so the subscription is access rather than a loss-leader with a metered bill behind it. Yearly is $150 — two months free.
What happens if my card fails?
A 7-day grace period and an email before any number is released. Releasing a number works even on a lapsed plan, so you can always stop the cost.
Let it ring you first.
A real number, your rules in front of it, and something that answers in your words when you genuinely can't.
$15/mo or $150/yr · cancel any time · phone.parsons.ai is in beta