Virtual receptionist pricing, fair dinkum and in full

The short version lives on the homepage. This is the long one — every plan, every inclusion, every rate, in one table. A few ground rules before you read it: every price is AUD with GST included, so what you see is what leaves your account. There's no setup fee on any plan. There's no lock-in contract on any plan. And the job is the same on every plan: the phone gets answered by a warm Aussie voice that tells callers it's AI, messages get to you by text, and bookable jobs land in your calendar mid-call — booking is never an add-on here.

The names mean what they say. Starter is for a phone that catches you out now and then. Steady is for a phone that rings most days. Busy is for a phone that rings daily and a business that quotes a lot. Flat Out is for exactly what it sounds like.

The cheapest plan isn't a demo. Starter gets the same receptionist, the same voice, the same 24/7 coverage as Flat Out — the bigger plans buy more call time and more done-for-you extras, not a better phone manner. Here's what every single plan includes:

• Around-the-clock answering, no after-hours surcharge, ever. Nights, weekends, public holidays — same price as a Tuesday morning. That matters more than it sounds: in one real month on our engine (30 Jul to 22 Aug 2026), 1 call in 5 came in outside business hours and 1 in 10 landed on a weekend. There's more on why that's the quiet killer of small-business phones on our after-hours answering page.
• Real bookings, not just messages. Giday sees availability, offers real times, locks the job in and texts the customer a confirmation — mid-call. The big answering services sell diary booking as a separate metered product at around $2.99 a minute on the plans we checked (published pricing, 24 August 2026). We think booking IS the job — see the full comparison against human services.
• Messages straight to you. Anything that isn't a booking becomes a tidy SMS and email to you, not a voicemail you'll get to on Friday.
• Spam screened out. Telemarketers and wrong numbers get politely shown the door without chewing through your minutes.
• Patch-through for real emergencies. Genuine urgent calls can be put straight through to your mobile or on-call number.
• Honest AI, every call. Giday introduces itself as your AI assistant in the first breath. No pretending — it's policy, and callers respect it.
• A real Australian phone number. We set you up with your own AU number. Divert your existing number to it with one dial code (reversible any time), or advertise the new number directly — your call.

Every answering service has a paragraph about what happens when you go over your plan. Ours is the one we're proudest of, so it gets a whole section. First, what happens as a big month unfolds:

Here's the worked example, because a promise you can't check isn't worth much. Say you're on Starter at $49 with 30 minutes included, and the month gets away from you:

Notice what never happens: a Starter client billed $139 in overage for a Steady-sized month. At the end of the month we price every route — your plan plus its overage, or any bigger plan's flat price plus its overage — and bill whichever is cheapest. For that month's bill you're treated exactly as if you'd bought the bigger plan, its minute and SMS allowances included; your actual plan, its features and next month's price don't change, and we never move you up without asking. If the big months keep coming, Verity will email suggesting the upgrade properly; if it was a one-off, you stay put and nobody mentions it again.

Plain rules, no fine-print gymnastics:

• Call time means talk time on answered calls — the minutes Giday actually spends looking after your callers.
• Texts covers everything Giday sends on your behalf: booking confirmations to customers, reminders, and messages relayed to you. Starter includes 60 a month, Steady 150, Busy 350, Flat Out 800.
• Extra texts are 15¢ each past your allowance — and like minutes, they're always capped by the busy-month promise above. When a month is billed as a bigger plan, that plan's minute and SMS allowances are used in the arithmetic too.
• Extra minutes run $3.00 on Starter, $2.50 on Steady, $2.00 on Busy and $1.65 on Flat Out — and only ever up to the point where a bigger plan's flat price is cheaper, because then that's what you're billed.

One thing about repeat busy months. Everything above is a one-off big month. If a second big month lands straight after the first, that isn't a busy month any more — that's your new normal, and we'll have already emailed you to say so. From that second month in a row we bill the month as one plan up, rather than jumping you to whichever plan happens to be cheapest: on the Starter example above, $249 instead of $199. Still capped, still no runaway overage — but it's the nudge to move onto the plan you're actually using, where the same money buys a bigger allowance and a cheaper per-minute rate. We'll never move you without asking, and one quiet month puts you straight back to the full promise.

The honest summary: allowances exist so we can publish flat prices, not so we can ambush you past them. Nobody gets a bill-shock invoice from Giday. That's not a slogan, it's arithmetic — the worked table above shows the worst each of those months can ever cost.

In the founder's words, because there's no better way to say it: "Give it a go — 60 minutes of call time on us, for a week." That's roughly 50 real calls' worth at the mix we see — a proper trial, not a demo reel. Fully live, real callers, real bookings landing in your real calendar. Here's exactly how it runs:

Why card up front? Honesty runs both directions. We put real minutes and a real setup into every trial, so we ask for the small commitment of a card — and in return you get a trial that only starts when there's actually something to trial. We haven't seen another service that starts your clock at the first answered call — check the fine print on any trial you're offered.

The stuff that's usually buried in a terms page, put where you can see it:

• Billing is by card, through Stripe. Same infrastructure half the internet uses. We never see your card number.
• Cancel any time, yourself. There's a self-serve portal for your card, your plan and cancelling — no phone call to a retention team, no "let me get my manager".
• Month to month means month to month. No 12-month terms, no exit fees, no notice periods beyond the month you're in.
• GST is included in every price on this page. $49 means $49.
• No setup fee. Some services charge up to $99 to switch you on (published pricing we checked, 24 August 2026). We charge nothing — setup is our problem.
• Your number stays yours. Diverting to Giday is one dial code and just as easy to undo. The AU number we set up for you is yours to use while you're subscribed, and if you ever leave we support porting it out — we don't hold numbers hostage.
• One fair warning, because honesty is the house style: if you advertise the Giday number itself rather than diverting your existing one, leaving later means updating your ads. Most businesses will want to divert their existing number for exactly that reason — we'd rather tell you before you choose than after.

Count last week's incoming calls — missed ones included, they're the point — and multiply by four. That's your month, near enough. Then read down:

Two honest nudges. If your quotes are the money-maker — you price jobs over the phone all day — Busy is where Giday starts quoting from your own price list and chasing quotes by text, and that tends to pay for the step up. And if you're not sure you need a receptionist at all, or whether what you actually need is an extra pair of hands on admin, read our plain-English virtual receptionist vs virtual assistant guide first — they're different jobs, and we'd rather you buy the right one.

Pricing pages are cheap to write. So here's what a real month of Giday's engine looks like — the same engine, answering live for a Brisbane locksmith since late July 2026. These numbers are from the measured window of 30 July to 22 August 2026, and we'll re-cut them as the months roll on:

Same window: jobs booked into the calendar mid-call, priced quotes given over the phone from the approved price list, and messages relayed to the owner by text. Every booking in that measured window synced to the job system and was confirmed to the customer by SMS. If you want the full picture of what a virtual receptionist actually does all day, or how these numbers stack up against paying a human service per call, the honest comparison is the next read.