Honest comparison · updated October 2026
Smith.ai answers your phone and bills you per call, so the month your marketing finally works is the month the invoice spikes. It waits for a phone you made ring some other way. Rocketship runs the acquisition loop that makes it ring: it finds your buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up, answers the replies, books the meetings, answers your phone 24/7 on your own number, and builds the site where the caller pays. Plans run from $24.99 to $149 a month, published, and every monthly plan starts with a 7-day free trial (card required).
Disclosure: Rocketship publishes this page, so we are the competitor here. Smith.ai figures come from its published plans and independent pricing guides as of mid-2026, and they change. Verify current rates at smith.ai before deciding.
The cost math
Smith.ai's human plans start around $292.50 a month for 30 calls, which is about $9.75 a call, with overages around $9.75 to $11 per call after that. Now run the month you actually care about: the campaign lands and the phone rings 100 times. The first 30 calls are in the plan and the other 70 cost roughly $680 to $770, so the bill lands near $975 to $1,060 before any add-ons. Independent billing analyses suggest real invoices often run 20 to 30 percent above base plans once overages and add-ons are counted. The meter runs fastest in exactly the month your marketing works. Per-call billing is a tax on success, and the busier you get, the more the vendor makes.
The floor under that meter is payroll. Humans answer those calls and are paid salaries, which have to come out of a per-call rate. That is why a human plan works out near $10 a call and cannot work out near ten cents. Smith.ai's AI tier keeps a meter too: roughly $95 a month for roughly 50 to 60 calls. A smaller meter is still a meter.
Rocketship's phone numbers are different but not unlimited. Launch includes 30 voice minutes, Frontier 80 and Mission Control 150, and a typical answered call runs two to three minutes. At 30 calls that is about 75 minutes, so Frontier covers it at $84 with a line. At 100 calls you are near 250 minutes, which is a top-up on top of a plan, about $134 to $199 depending on the plan. That is less than the human service in a busy month, but it is a real number that grows with your call volume, and you should check it against your own call log before you decide.
And look at what the meter never bought you. None of those dollars found a buyer, sent an email, answered a reply, made an outbound call, built the page where the caller pays, or held a pipeline. Smith.ai starts when the phone rings and stops when the call ends. Everything that made it ring, and everything that turns the caller into revenue, you are buying somewhere else. $292.50 buys a month of answering. Rocketship's Launch plan, at $24.99, runs the whole loop at a smaller scale: 50 leads a month found and emailed from your own Gmail, replies answered, and meetings booked. For a business that mostly needs its phone answered by a trained human on every call, the per-call price is what that coverage costs, and you should price it that way.
The test you can run this month
Sign up for both. Smith.ai takes a card, and so do we. Run them for a month, then compare two numbers: what each one billed you, and how many customers each one produced. Their invoice counts calls. Ours shows the same flat plan price you saw on the pricing page, next to the emails sent, replies answered, meetings booked and payments taken. Keep the one that produced a customer.
When Rocketship is the right choice
Start your 7-day free trial (card required) and find out. Or call the number below and ask the hardest question a customer asked you this week.