Every SaaS pricing page is built the same way. Take the full product, remove things until it costs $29, and call what is left the entry plan. It works because the entry plan is not really a product — it is a doorway, and nobody expects a doorway to be a room.
We built Starter that way first. It had a phone line and about twenty-five minutes of voice on it. Then we did the arithmetic that we should have done before writing the price.
Twenty-five minutes is eight calls
A real inbound call to a clinic, a salon, a garage or a letting agent runs two to four minutes. Somebody explains what they want, gets asked two questions back, and either books something or does not. Twenty-five minutes of that is roughly eight conversations. Spread across a month, that is one call every four days.
Eight calls cannot answer the only question a new customer actually has, which is: can this thing handle my front desk? Eight calls can only produce an anecdote. And an anecdote about an AI answering a phone is far more likely to be the one call where it got something wrong than the seven where it did not — that is simply how memory works.
A trial allowance small enough to produce an anecdote instead of an answer is worse than no allowance at all. It gets spent, it proves nothing, and the customer concludes something they had no evidence for.
So the phone came off Starter on purpose. Not to push anyone toward the more expensive plan, but because a phone line that runs out in the first week is a demo of the product failing.
What Starter actually is
It is the two channels that cost us almost nothing to run and that a small business can get real value out of on day one:
- A hosted chat page — your AI employee at its own URL, which you can put anywhere.
- A printable QR code that resolves to it. On a poster in the window, on a menu, on a receipt, on the side of a van. A customer points a camera at it, gives their name once, and is talking to someone who knows your prices and your opening hours.
- 150 messages a month, one employee, one seat.
The QR route is the part people underestimate. It needs no website, no phone number, and no account anywhere — and the conversation persists, so someone who scans the same code next month carries on where they stopped rather than starting again as a stranger.
Where the phone starts
| Plan | Voice | Why the line sits there |
|---|---|---|
| Starter — $29 | None after the trial | Chat and QR, unlimited by minutes |
| Growth — $79 | 150 minutes | ~50 real calls a month: enough to judge it |
| Business — $299 | 360 minutes | A front desk that is genuinely busy |
One hundred and fifty minutes is around fifty conversations. That is a sample, not an anecdote. By the end of the month you know whether it books appointments correctly, whether it hands over when someone is annoyed, and whether your customers noticed. Those are answerable questions at fifty calls and unanswerable at eight.
The related decision: going over doesn't cut you off
The same reasoning produced a second rule, and this one is worth stating plainly because most usage priced software does the opposite. If you run past your allowance, nothing stops working. The extra messages and minutes bill — $5 per 100 messages, $0.35 a minute — and the call continues.
The alternative is a system that hangs up on a paying customer's customer to protect a $79 subscription. There is no version of that trade that comes out ahead.
Every seven-day trial includes fifteen minutes on the generative voice, whichever plan you pick, so you can hear the thing before you decide which of these you want.