As of: 21 October 2026

From around 200 call minutes per month, a flat-rate AI phone assistant is cheaper than the human 24/7 answering services compared here; people keep the advantage in negotiation, judgement and emotion (prices as of 14 Oct 2026).

A human 24/7 answering service costs from €199 per month plus €0.69 to €0.99 per minute; an AI phone assistant such as Empfango from €99 flat with 1,000 minutes; a part-time office clerk from around €1,200 gross, office hours only.

So the cost question comes down to volume and time of day. From roughly 200 call minutes per month, the AI phone assistant is the cheapest option, and it becomes relatively cheaper with every additional minute. People remain stronger wherever negotiation, judgement or reassurance is needed. The details are in the two tables below; Empfango's plans are listed under Pricing.

Human answering services charge a monthly base fee plus call and handling minutes. Die Telefonhelden quote €199 per month plus a per-minute rate for their around-the-clock package; Büroservice24 starts at €129.90 for 24/7 availability (as of 14 Oct 2026).

Die Telefonhelden (Nuremberg) list five packages. According to the plan overview, the office-hours packages Starter to Premium cost €49.99 to €79.99 base fee and €0.75 to €0.99 per minute, available Monday to Friday from 8 am to 6 pm or 7 am to 8 pm, with Saturdays in the larger packages. The around-the-clock package costs €199 per month; the page states €0.69 per minute in one place and €0.99 in another, so we calculate with both values below. Appointment scheduling and call transfers cost extra.

Büroservice24 lists three tiers: from €49.90 (Mon to Fri, 7 am to 7 pm), from €79.90 (Mon to Sun, 6 am to 10 pm) and from €129.90 (around the clock). Per-minute rates are not published on the pricing page and are available on request. Neither provider charges a setup fee.

To be fair: according to our research, Die Telefonhelden is the only answering service with dedicated pages for building cleaners and for security and guard services, including sick call coordination and an agreed escalation plan.

Empfango costs from €99 per month, a flat rate with no top-ups, including 1,000 call minutes, cancellable monthly and with no setup fee (as of 14 Oct 2026).

The minutes are included in the price. When the allowance is used up, Empfango notifies the customer; nothing is topped up automatically. According to the pricing page, a typical call lasts 2.5 to 4 minutes, so 1,000 minutes correspond to roughly 250 to 400 calls per month. The data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR is included in every plan, along with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Other AI providers range from around €35 to €500 per month, usually with far fewer included minutes; a one-to-one comparison is available under HalloPetra alternative for cleaning companies.

A part-time office clerk working 20 hours a week costs around €1,200 gross per month at the statutory minimum wage of €13.90, plus employer contributions, holiday and sick days, and covers office hours only.

The maths: 20 hours per week equals about 87 hours per month; multiplied by the minimum wage of €13.90 in force since 1 January 2026, that comes to around €1,205 gross. Qualified staff earn more, and the cost is the same whether 200 or 1,000 minutes are spent on the phone.

In practice, many cleaning and security companies do not have this clerk at all. The phone ends up with the site manager or the dispatcher, who are actually needed out on site. What that phone time costs is shown by the site manager phone time calculator.

At 200 minutes per month, a human 24/7 service costs roughly €337 to €397; at 1,000 minutes, €889 to €1,189. Empfango stays at €99 in all three cases because the minutes are included in the flat rate.

Table 1 works through the monthly costs. For Die Telefonhelden's around-the-clock package the result is a range because the page quotes two per-minute rates; for Büroservice24 the per-minute rate is missing, so only the base fee is shown. Extras such as appointment scheduling or call transfers are not included. The office clerk costs the same regardless of volume but is not at the desk at night or at weekends.

For context: human services count call and handling minutes, including the time spent on the note. With Empfango, call duration counts; transcript and summary are generated automatically.

People are better in emotionally charged conversations, in negotiations and with requests that require judgement; an answering service can also decide for itself, following your escalation plan, whom to wake at night.

Specifically, we see four situations in which a person on the phone has the advantage:

• An annoyed client complains about a floor that was not cleaned and wants an immediate commitment. A person can reassure and commit; Empfango records the complaint in a structured way and forwards it.
• Negotiation: discounts, rescheduling in exchange for something, special terms. That remains a job for people.
• The request is unclear or multi-layered and needs follow-up questions that are not in any call script.
• The in-house clerk knows sites, staff and responsibilities, reschedules on their own and books directly in the dispatch software.

An AI phone assistant takes any number of calls at the same time, documents every call as a transcript with a summary, and costs the same at 5:40 am as at 2 pm.

These are the points where Empfango outperforms a human service or a single office clerk:

• Parallel calls: three sick calls at 5:40 am do not end up in a queue; they are answered simultaneously.
• No surcharges: nights, weekends and public holidays are included in the flat rate.
• Documentation: every call is stored as a transcript and summary in the dashboard; the notification goes to the responsible person via WhatsApp, Telegram, email or webhook.
• Structured capture: name, callback number, site and request are always asked for in the same way, no matter who calls.
• Knowledge base and appointments: Empfango answers recurring questions from stored information and checks or books appointments in the connected calendar.
• Multilingual and call transfer: calls in other languages are answered; urgent cases are transferred to an on-call number with a ring timeout, otherwise a callback is recorded.

For cleaning, security and caretaking companies, the biggest benefit lies in the early morning hours and at night, when sick calls and fault reports come in and nobody is in the office.

Example sick call: at 5:40 am a cleaner calls in. Empfango records name, site and expected duration and reports the sick call via WhatsApp to the operations manager, who then organises cover. How this works in detail is described under Capturing sick calls by phone. Example night-time fault: at 11:50 pm a client reports an open door. Empfango records site and request and transfers the call to the on-call duty, see 24/7 fault intake and On-call and escalation.

Often the answer is not either-or. Many companies use Empfango as the first stage that answers and documents every call, and let the cases that need judgement reach a person via transfer or callback. How a security company implemented this is shown in the Sekuris Dienstleistungen case study; the typical calls for each sector are on the pages for cleaning, security services and building service providers.

Human or AI: an external answering service is data processing on behalf of a controller under Art. 28 GDPR and requires a data processing agreement; sick calls add health data under Art. 9 GDPR.

With human services, the provider's staff listen in and write notes; the DPA governs how that data is stored. Die Telefonhelden state that they work in compliance with the GDPR and provide a DPA. With Empfango, the DPA is included in every plan; the service runs on infrastructure in Frankfurt am Main, the language model via Azure OpenAI in the EU region, audio is not stored permanently by default, and every call starts with a fixed announcement that an AI is speaking. The complete list of sub-processors is in the privacy policy; the obligations under the EU AI Act are explained there as well.

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