Ruby is a live virtual receptionist service: real people answer your calls, billed by the minute, from $250 a month for 50 minutes. Beside is an AI that answers your business line itself, flat at $199.99 a year. Ruby prices the conversation. Beside prices the line.
The short version
We answer phones for small businesses all day, and the owners who ask us about Ruby are rarely asking whether a robot is warmer than a person. They are asking what a phone that works should cost.
Ruby is the better buy when a real person answering in under ten seconds is the product (Source: Ruby, 2026): a clinic, a firm with regulated intake, an office whose callers arrive angry. Beside is the better buy when your own cell is the business line and you want every call answered, transcribed and summarized with nobody counting minutes.
Two different products wearing the same word
Both get called an answering service. They are not the same shape. Ruby will host a local or toll-free number for you, and its pricing-model page lists it as free, with no porting fee to bring an existing one (Source: Ruby, 2026). Its receptionists then answer that line on your behalf.
Beside is the handset. Port your existing number across or forward your carrier’s calls to it, and your callers keep dialing the number they already have (Source: Beside, 2026). One line per user, unlimited calls and texts across the US and Canada, included.
That is also the safest way to try it: forward your line first, port later or never, and if it is not working point the calls back at your carrier the same afternoon.
What happens when the caller is upset
Nobody picks up at Beside. There is no person on the other end to hear that a caller is furious and talk them down. What happens instead is specific: the call is answered instantly with no hold music, in a voice you set up and can clone from your own, the caller is greeted by name where we know it, and the whole conversation is transcribed and summarized.
The summary reaches you with suggested actions and any callback request, and you call back from your own line already knowing what the call was about. For an angry customer that is worse than a good receptionist and better than a voicemail box.
What a receptionist minute actually costs
Fifty minutes is $250 a month. A hundred is $395. Two hundred is $720. Five hundred is $1,725, and past that you call sales. Two other Ruby pages say plans start at $245, so treat $250 as the number on the plans table itself (Source: Ruby, 2026).
Divide it out and the entry plan works out to $5.00 for each included minute, falling to $3.95, then $3.60, then $3.45 as you buy bigger buckets. That arithmetic is ours, done against Ruby’s published prices. Ruby bills per minute and rounds up (Source: Ruby, 2026).
Ruby publishes the plan prices but not the overage rate, so an honest comparison stops at the included minutes. If your calls run about three minutes, fifty minutes is about sixteen conversations, and the next one after that runs you past the allowance whether it booked a job or was a wrong number. Ruby does not publish what that minute costs, but it does publish the tier above: a hundred minutes is $395. So the practical price of a busier month is the next plan up, not a mystery line on the invoice.
That is not Ruby overcharging. A trained person’s time is genuinely worth several dollars a minute, and that is the real trade. The problem is not the rate. It is that the meter gets more expensive exactly when the phone starts working, and the fix is a bigger plan, bought before the month that needs it.
What Ruby does that Beside does not
Ruby’s people are the product. Ruby answers around the clock, staffs bilingual receptionists, trains them on HIPAA, manages your calendar to prevent double bookings, screens unwanted calls, and can securely process payments for you. Ruby puts its average answer time under ten seconds, and says more than 15,000 businesses use it (Source: Ruby, 2026).
Ruby’s case for the minute is that the model is inclusive: it covers the features most customers use, and Ruby “doesn’t put limitations on call handling” (Source: Ruby, 2026). Managed live chat is sold separately.
Where the appointment lands, and what happens to your number
Beside’s own pricing page puts it plainly: the AI “handles appointment requests and books them directly into your calendar” (Source: Beside, 2026). What it does not do is name a calendar product. Its published integrations are CRMs and connectors: HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Follow Up Boss, Monday, Zapier, QuickBooks, Square and nine more (Source: Beside, 2026).
If a two-way sync into Google Calendar by name is non-negotiable, check it before you switch rather than after. The number itself is the easy part: port it or forward it, and nothing changes for your callers.
A metered service or your own line
| Beside | Ruby | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | An AI on your own line, instantly, with no hold music | A real person, average answer under 10 seconds |
| How it bills | Flat. $199.99/user/year or $29.99/month | Per minute, rounded up, by plan tier |
| Entry price | $199.99 a year | $250 a month for 50 minutes |
| Your phone number | Beside is the line you call and text from. Port it or forward it | Hosts a local or toll-free number, no porting fees. Receptionists answer it for you |
| Languages | English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, on calls and texts | English and Spanish, around the clock |
| Payments during the call | Not offered | Offered |
| HIPAA-trained handling | Not offered | Offered |
Two of those rows go to Ruby.
A month on each, worked out
- Tuesday, 8am. A burst supply line, and a flat call-out fee of about $300 (Source: HomeAdvisor, 2026). Three minutes to book it, metered on Ruby.
- Thursday, 2pm. Someone talks for eleven minutes about a job you do not do, and books nothing. On a fifty-minute plan that is more than a fifth of the month. On Beside it is priced the same as silence.
- Saturday, 9pm. A system has died in August and the homeowner is calling everyone on the list. Replacements average $7,500 (Source: HomeAdvisor, 2026). Ruby answers with a person, around the clock (Source: Ruby, 2026). Beside answers it too: the AI receptionist “picks up 24/7 by default, including evenings, weekends, holidays” (Source: Beside, 2026). Another three minutes, and only one of them meters it.
On the same three-minute assumption that is about seventeen minutes across the three, well inside the fifty. That month costs $250 on Ruby and $29.99 on Beside, or $16.67 if you paid for the year. The month you run past fifty minutes costs $250 plus an overage Ruby does not publish, or $395 if you move up a plan.
“Some of my clients don’t always speak English. So I trained him to speak Spanish, French… across the board.” — — Tim Curts, Co-owner, TWFG Insurance Services
Tim runs an insurance agency, squarely the business Ruby sells to. He also says he went from writing about $40,000 in new written premium to about $120,000, his own figure and not a Beside average, and ties it to going from four daily referrals to eight. Beside answers in four languages, on calls and texts (Source: Beside, 2026).
If what you need is a person on the line
Do not buy an AI to fake it. Price a live service against your real minutes rather than a guess: pull last month’s call log, add up the talk time, and find your tier before you sign. Under 50 minutes is $250; above it Ruby does not publish the rate. Beside is worth a week in the other case.
Who should stay with Ruby, and who should switch
Stay with Ruby if your callers routinely need a person right now, if you handle protected health information, if you want payments taken during the call, or if managed live chat is part of the job. Stay if fifty minutes covers your month and a human voice is worth $250, which for plenty of businesses it is.
Switch to Beside if your own phone is the business line, if your volume swings, or if you would rather have every call transcribed and searchable than a message slip. You are buying a phone that answers, not an hourly stranger.
Also: Beside compared to Smith.ai, a per-call service instead of a per-minute one, and how a Los Angeles plumbing shop runs its line on it. Full price list: Beside’s pricing page.
PS — we’re also building Beside Agentic, which runs more of the revenue loop than the phone. Opening soon.
Sources: Ruby plans and pricing, Ruby per-minute pricing, Ruby live virtual receptionists, Ruby answering service, HomeAdvisor plumbing, HomeAdvisor HVAC, App Store. All checked July 29, 2026. Per-minute figures are our arithmetic. Photo: Beside customer story, TWFG Insurance Services.