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Both use AI to catch inbound leads before they go cold. The real differences are in how you're billed, how the AI is trained, and what it's actually built to handle. Here's a straight, sourced comparison.
Smith.ai is a real, well-established company — ten years in business, over 25 million calls handled, a 4.9 rating on G2. If your business lives and dies by phone intake, their live-agent network is a genuine strength worth taking seriously.
This page exists because we think SalesAPE is the better fit for a specific kind of business: one whose leads come in across text, email, WhatsApp and web as much as the phone, and who wants an AI trained specifically on their own conversations, not a shared model built mainly around legal intake.
Everything below is sourced directly from each company's own pricing and case study pages.
Smith.ai figures are taken from smith.ai and smith.ai/pricing/ai-receptionist as published. Vendors change pricing and features regularly — always confirm directly before deciding.
| Smith.ai | SalesAPE | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing | Per-call, tiered plans: $0/mo for 25 calls, $150/mo for 75+ calls at $1.60–$2.00/call, $500/mo for 300+ calls at $1.30–$1.67/call. Extra calls beyond your plan cost $2.17–$3.00 each. | A plan scoped to your actual business and volume, agreed with you directly — ask us for specifics rather than guessing from a generic tier. |
| Channels | Built around phone calls, with a network of 500+ live North American agents for escalation and overflow. | Text, email, WhatsApp, voice and web — trained to meet leads on whichever channel they actually use. |
| Training | Loaded with your procedures, policies and knowledge base, plus industry-specific keyword logic for your practice area. | Custom-trained directly on your own website, product catalog and historical customer conversations. |
| Getting started | Live receptionists go live on day one; the AI receptionist is trained and refined in parallel over the following days. | A structured onboarding process where your team teaches the AI your business before it ever talks to a customer. |
| Who it's built for | Roughly 80% law firms; the rest in home services, healthcare, dental, and IT/MSPs. | B2B and B2C service businesses — real estate, transportation, events, automotive, active leisure and more. |
| When it needs a human | Around 25% of AI-first calls currently get handed to a live agent from Smith.ai's own network. | Edge cases get flagged and routed to your own team, based on rules trained specifically to your business. |
Individual results vary. These are documented outcomes from SalesAPE's published case studies.
No quota, no overage fees to track, no shared script built for someone else's industry.