Ruby Receptionists Alternative
A Ruby Receptionists alternative should not bill you by the minute for the privilege of not missing a call. The Mayor is an AI front desk for local businesses: when you can't pick up, it answers, texts the caller back from your own business number, books the appointment against your real calendar, and does the follow-up — and you talk to it like a chief of staff, in plain language, about your whole day. Mayor. Talk to your business.
Ruby is a genuinely good human answering service, and it has been since 2003. Its owners' frustration is not the people — it's the meter. Ruby starts at $250 a month for 50 receptionist minutes, roughly $5 a minute, and the mechanics behind that number are where the complaints live: calls are billed in 60-second increments rounded up, so a ten-second call costs a full minute; any live-answered call of ten seconds or longer is billable, including robocalls and wrong numbers; go over your bundle and the overage lands in arrears at $3.30–$5.40 a minute with no spend cap; and the minutes you paid for but didn't use never roll over. One long-time customer put the experience plainly on Trustpilot: "the company charges you for the dropped calls to add insult to injury … effectively, the company gouged me for $1100 for another month of service that was not needed." A reviewer roundup of the pattern is shorter: "Billing surprises. Calls you pay for even when nobody talks to anyone."
| Ruby Receptionists | The Mayor (mayor.mehyar.us) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | Trained human receptionists in a call centre, following your script | AI front desk in your business's voice, following the rules, hours and prices you set |
| Starting price | $250/mo for 50 minutes (~$5/min); no free plan and no free trial (21-day money-back guarantee) | $0 — Free plan, no credit card to start |
| Paid price | $395/mo (100 min), $720/mo (200 min), $1,725/mo (500 min) | Pro $99/mo; founding cohort $79.20/mo, locked at that rate for as long as your founding subscription stays active |
| How you're metered | Per receptionist minute, 60-second rounding, overage $3.30–$5.40/min billed in arrears, unused minutes never roll over, robocalls/wrong numbers billable if answered 10+ seconds, 3% card surcharge | By reply attempts — Free 100/mo (~10 conversations), Pro 1,000/mo (~100 conversations) — counted openly on the pricing page, top-up packs $4/$8/$12. No per-minute receptionist meter, no rounding, no arrears overage bill |
| What happens on a missed call | A Ruby operator answers it live and takes a message or follows your call flow | The Mayor answers, or texts the caller back from your connected business number moments later, and carries the conversation to a booking |
| After the call | You get the message (email, text or portal) — the follow-up is yours to do | The follow-up is part of the job: confirmations, reminders, and win-backs on the schedule you approve |
| Booking | Message-taking and basic intake; some calendar booking on set-up flows | Books directly against your real calendar and your rules — services, hours, buffers — while the caller is still engaged |
| Talking about money | Operators can quote the prices in your script | Numbers wait for you. Any customer-facing reply carrying a price, quote or total is held for your approval before it sends; number-free replies, including bookings, flow automatically |
| Hours | 24/7 live answering on every plan | The same answer at 3 pm and 3 am — nights, weekends and holidays at the same plan price |
| The owner layer | None — Ruby faces your callers only | You talk to The Mayor about your business: the day's money in view, invoice-by-conversation drafts you approve (CashText, at module launch), and a weekly posting plan you approve post by post |
| Separate costs, stated plainly | Overage and the card surcharge above | Calls, texts and your business number run through your own Telnyx or Twilio account — your provider bills you directly at its rates, separate from your Mayor plan and never on your Mayor bill. Text-back works once your number is connected; setup takes minutes |
Where Ruby wins — honestly
- Real humans. A good Ruby receptionist brings warmth, judgement and improvisation to an upset caller, a delicate situation, or a call that wanders across five topics — a human voice AI does not match, and for law, medical and other sensitive intake that can be the whole decision.
- Twenty-plus years of doing exactly this, with US-based receptionists, bilingual answering, and a reputation built since 2003. The Mayor is a young product by comparison.
- If your calls are long consultations rather than routine front-desk work, a person following your script may simply fit better — plenty of businesses run a mix: software for routine volume and after-hours, humans for the calls that need a human.
Where we win
- No minute meter. The complaint pattern above is not a bad month — it's the pricing model. There is no minute to round up, no robocall to bill you for, no arrears overage, and no bundle of minutes expiring unused.
- The job gets finished, not just the message taken. Ruby hands you the message and the follow-up is yours. The Mayor books the appointment, sends the confirmation and the reminder, and texts back the missed caller — the hour of front-desk work wrapped around every call is the product.
- Prices never leave without you. An answering service quotes whatever is in the script. The Mayor holds every priced reply for your approval — your customers never get a number you didn't OK.
- Free is a real starting point. Ruby has no free plan and no trial. The Mayor's Free plan is $0 with no card to start — about ten real conversations a month to prove it on your own phone line before Pro's $99 is ever discussed.
The complaints this page answers, in customers' own words
- "Charges you for the dropped calls" and a $1,100 extra month after cancelling (Trustpilot) — Pro is a flat monthly plan you can cancel in Manage billing; there is no per-call or per-minute arrears bill chasing you out the door. (Payments already made are final — that's in our Terms, in the open.)
- "Calls you pay for even when nobody talks to anyone" — a robocall that hits The Mayor costs you no receptionist minute, because there is no receptionist-minute meter.
- "One busy week can turn a $235 month into a $600 month without warning" (alternatives roundup on Ruby's overage math) — a busy week on The Mayor uses more of a reply allowance you can see, with a $4–$12 top-up you choose — never an overage invoice you didn't.
Start free
No credit card. Connect your business number, let The Mayor catch the next call you'd have missed, and talk to your business about how it went. Mayor. Talk to your business.
Start free See how The Mayor works
Ruby® and Ruby Receptionists are trademarks of Ruby Receptionists, Inc. This is an independent comparison page; The Mayor is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ruby Receptionists, Inc. Ruby pricing and plan details were read from Ruby's public pages and published pricing analyses in November 2026 — check ruby.com for their current figures.