How much does an AI phone agent cost for a museum, gallery or theater in 2026?
Pay-as-you-go pricing for a vertical AI phone agent, broken down by institution size. Three realistic scenarios with monthly cost ranges, compared to a full-time reception FTE.
The pricing model in one line
AI ARTEDUSA charges $0.15 per incoming-call minute, rounded up to the next minute. No subscription, no setup fee, no per-seat license. You only pay when the agent talks. There is a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.
The implication: your monthly cost scales linearly with your call volume. There is no commitment penalty if a quiet month follows a busy one.
Three realistic scenarios
The numbers below are based on volumes we see in the field for each institution size. Average call duration assumed: 3 minutes.
- Small gallery (single location, ~150 calls / month): ~$70 / month.
- Regional museum (mid-sized, ~800 calls / month): ~$360 / month.
- National theater or regional auction house (~600 to 900 calls per month or per sale): $270 to $900 / month.
- Large national museum or top-tier auction house (2000+ calls / month at peak): $900 to $3000 / month — still well below one full-time human equivalent.
How that compares to a reception FTE
A full-time reception agent in France costs an institution roughly €3000 to €3500 per month all-in (salary + employer charges). A regional museum that runs the AI for $360 / month is therefore spending around 12% of a FTE on AI reception coverage — and getting 24/7 multilingual answering, structured call summaries, and zero overtime.
The AI is not a one-for-one replacement. The intent is to reabsorb the calls that overflow your team (peak hours, evenings, weekends, foreign-language requests) and to give your humans back the calls that actually need a human.
What is included at $0.15 / minute
No hidden line items. The per-minute price covers:
- Vertical agent pre-trained for your sector (museum, gallery, auction house, theater).
- 11 languages, including French, English, Italian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin.
- RAG knowledge base hosted in the EU — you upload your PDFs and the agent answers from them.
- Conversation transcripts and structured summaries in the dashboard.
- Human escalation tool (`talk_to_human`) wired into your fallback number.
- Stripe billing, monthly invoice, no card kept on file in our systems.
What is not included
Two items sit outside the per-minute price:
- The phone number itself (Twilio US numbers are ~$1.15/month; EU numbers vary). For most clients this is rounded to a few dollars per month, billed by Twilio directly during number porting, or absorbed if you keep your existing number on forwarding.
- Custom integrations beyond the standard CRM / calendar / ticketing connectors. We quote those individually.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a minimum monthly spend?
No. If you have no calls in a month, you pay zero. This is the point of pay-as-you-go.
What if I exceed my budget?
You can set a soft monthly cap in the dashboard. Above it we send an email alert. There is no hard cap by default — we never want to cut a live call mid-sentence — but you can configure one on request.
Are calls billed in 6-second increments or by full minute?
By full minute, rounded up. A 2 minutes 10 seconds call counts as 3 minutes.
Do you charge for incoming or outgoing calls?
Incoming only. Outbound calling (callbacks, reminders) is on the roadmap but not part of the current pay-per-minute pricing.