How to Price AI Employees: What Actually Drives the Cost

"How much does an AI Employee cost?" is a fair question with an annoying answer, because the subscription is usually the part buyers understand and the part that surprises them is somewhere else entirely. Two vendors can quote what looks like the same monthly figure and produce very different bills, and the difference almost never sits in the headline number.

Here is what actually moves the cost, in the order it tends to bite.

1. The subscription is the simple part

A platform fee buys you the AI Employees, the workspace your team uses, and the governance around both. It should be a single monthly figure you can plan against, and you should be able to see it on a public page without talking to anyone.

Be suspicious of two things here. The first is a setup fee bolted onto a standard plan — if a product genuinely needs thousands of dirhams of manual work before it functions, that tells you something about the product. The second is a plan you cannot see the price of. "Contact us for pricing" is legitimate for genuinely bespoke requirements; it is not legitimate for a small business buying a receptionist.

2. Telephone traffic is a different bill, and it should look like one

This is where most of the confusion lives, because at least three separate things get called "minutes".

Calls inside your own company. A member of staff calling a colleague, or calling one of your own AI Employees, never touches the public telephone network. It should cost you nothing in calling minutes, because nobody is carrying it anywhere. If a vendor meters internal calls the same way it meters external ones, ask why.

Calls to and from the outside world. When a customer dials your number, or your business dials theirs, a telephone carrier carries that call and charges for it. These are network minutes, and they are a genuine external cost that varies by country and by whether the number is a landline or a mobile.

The AI actually taking part. When an AI Employee listens, understands and speaks on a call, that is AI processing, and it is measured separately from the carrier leg. A call between two humans on your team uses no AI at all, even though it may use network minutes. A conversation between a customer and an AI Employee uses both.

Those three things scale independently. A business with heavy internal collaboration and light external volume has a completely different bill from a call centre — and a pricing model that lumps all three together will overcharge one of them.

Included, or prepaid?

There is a real difference between "your plan includes 4,000 minutes" and "you top up a calling balance". Included allowances feel generous and go wrong quietly: you cannot see them depleting, and the month you exceed them is the month you get a bill you did not plan for.

A prepaid balance is less exciting and easier to control. You can see it, you top it up deliberately, and running low is visible before it is expensive. At LUIXER, network minutes work this way on purpose — they are not bundled into any plan, which is why no plan on our pricing page advertises a minute allowance.

3. How many AI Employees, and how many people

Most organisations do not stop at one. A receptionist answering the phone, someone chasing enquiries that went quiet, and an assistant handling scheduling are three different jobs, even when they share the same knowledge about your business underneath.

Cost scales with how many roles you are running and how many people on your team need access to supervise them. This is usually the most predictable driver — you know your own headcount.

4. What you are asking it to actually do

An AI Employee that answers questions and takes messages is a different thing from one that qualifies leads through a real process, arranges appointments against a live calendar, and routes sensitive actions through a human approval step.

More integrations and more governance mean more configuration and more ongoing care. This is not a reason to avoid them — the governance is usually the bit that makes the AI safe to point at real customers — but it is a reason a quote for "an AI receptionist" and a quote for "an AI receptionist that books into our system and escalates complaints to a named manager" are not comparable.

5. Deployment requirements

Most businesses need nothing special: the AI Employees run in the cloud and connect to the phone service you already have. Some cannot work that way — data residency rules, a regulator, a private network, or equipment that has to stay in the building.

Those requirements are real and they cost real money, which is why they belong in a contract conversation rather than on a plan card. If a vendor offers on-premise deployment at a published monthly price, ask them to describe what they are actually deploying.

What to ask any vendor

Dimension by dimension, not headline to headline:

• Is there a setup fee? Is it refundable if we stop?
• Are calls between our own staff and our own AI Employees charged? At what rate?
• Are network minutes included in the plan, or a separate balance? What happens when they run out — do calls stop, or do we get a bill?
• Is AI participation charged separately from carrier traffic? How is it measured?
• Do we have to move our phone number to use this, or can we keep our provider?
• What happens to the price when we add a second AI Employee? A tenth?
• Can we test it before we pay, and what exactly can we test?

That last one matters more than any of the numbers. A price you can only evaluate after committing is not really a price — it is a bet.

How LUIXER does it

Four plans, three of them with a published monthly figure in AED and USD, and no setup fee on any of them. Calls inside your organisation use no external calling minutes at all. Network minutes are a prepaid balance you control, separate from the subscription and not bundled into any plan. Enterprise is a contract because the things that bring organisations there — deployment location, data residency, procurement — genuinely cannot be honestly priced from a list.

See the pricing page for the current figures, and how LUIXER Calling works for what connecting your phone number actually involves.

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