ElevenLabs packages voice agents into a $29-a-month receptionist
Reception answers and books calls for small businesses, giving its founders a self-serve route below ElevenLabs' enterprise platform.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published
Primary source: ElevenLabs
Why it matters
Reception turns ElevenLabs' voice infrastructure into a low-cost application for small-business budgets, while testing its agents on messy calls tied directly to bookings and revenue.
Mati Staniszewski (@matiii) and Piotr Dabkowski (@dabkowski_piotr) launched Reception on September 16th, packaging ElevenLabs' voice-agent technology into a self-serve phone service for small businesses. Reception answers inbound calls, handles routine questions, checks calendars, books or reschedules appointments, and sends summaries, transcripts and recordings after each conversation, according to ElevenLabs' announcement and launch thread.
The product brings Staniszewski and Dabkowski back to the problem that led them to start ElevenLabs in 2022: making computer-generated voices sound less like computer-generated voices. The childhood friends grew up in Poland watching American films with dubbing they found unconvincing. Staniszewski later studied mathematics at Imperial College London and deployed technology for enterprises and governments at Palantir. Dabkowski studied advanced computer science at Cambridge, worked on machine learning at Google and published image-detection research at NeurIPS.
Reception applies those models to a narrower and less glamorous job: answering the phone while a plumber is under a sink, a stylist is with a client or a property manager is away from the desk. That specificity is the product strategy. Small-business owners are unlikely to assemble a voice model, phone provider, calendar connection and agent workflow themselves. They may pay a monthly bill for something that books the next job.
A website becomes the call script
ElevenLabs says a business can configure Reception in less than five minutes. The setup flow can scan a website and extract services, prices, appointment durations, employee names, hours, locations and contact information. The owner then selects a voice and greeting, tests the agent in a browser and receives a dedicated phone number.
Businesses can forward an existing line to that number or distribute it directly. A staff-first setting lets employees answer during selected hours, with Reception taking calls that go unanswered or arrive after closing. During a call, Reception can ask follow-up questions, check staff availability and write an appointment into the schedule. A connected booking page handles customers who would rather schedule online.
Reception supports over 70 languages, including English and Spanish, according to ElevenLabs. The published integrations include Google Calendar, Zapier, webhooks and Model Context Protocol servers, although access varies by subscription. These connections matter because an agent that merely recites office hours is a talking FAQ. Calendar access and workflow integrations let Reception complete the task that produced the call.
The risks also move with the agent's responsibilities. ElevenLabs has published no Reception-specific figures for booking accuracy, caller satisfaction, escalation rates, revenue or customer retention. Reception's FAQ says the product does not currently support HIPAA compliance, a material limitation for medical offices handling protected health information. ElevenLabs directs eligible healthcare customers toward the broader ElevenAgents platform, where business associate agreements are available to Enterprise customers.
The entry price is $29, plus the conversation
Reception starts with a 14-day trial that includes 30 phone minutes, a dedicated number and access to its features without a credit card. The Basic plan costs $29 a month for 75 call minutes, one number and one concurrent call. Additional usage costs $0.45 per minute.
The $79 Plus plan includes 275 credits, three phone numbers and three concurrent calls, with overage priced at $0.38 per credit. Premium costs $199 a month for 1,000 credits, five numbers, up to 10 concurrent calls and support for multiple locations. Its overage rate is $0.30 per credit. Annual billing lowers the effective monthly prices; the pricing page lists annual rates of $24, $66 and $166 per month for the Basic, Plus and Premium plans.
That price is below Smith.ai's paid plans, although Smith.ai offers a free tier with 25 calls per month. Smith.ai can also escalate selected conversations to live receptionists. ElevenLabs instead emphasizes a staff-first mode, allowing a business's own employees to answer before Reception steps in.
Communications platforms have also folded AI receptionists into their phone products. RingCentral said its AI Receptionist served more than 2,000 organizations when the product became generally available on June 30th, 2025. Zoom introduced a standalone receptionist on July 9th, 2026 that works with existing business phone systems, removing the requirement to adopt Zoom Phone.
ElevenLabs is betting that voice quality, multilingual coverage and a short setup flow can make Reception competitive without owning the underlying business phone system. Its low base price gets owners through the door. Per-minute usage gives ElevenLabs a direct claim on the value of every call the agent handles.
ElevenLabs moves downmarket after an enterprise push
Reception arrives during a broader commercial expansion under Staniszewski. On February 4th, ElevenLabs raised a $500 million Series D led by Sequoia Capital at an $11 billion valuation. ElevenLabs said the round brought its total funding to $781 million across five rounds and would fund research, product development and international expansion.
ElevenLabs later said it passed $500 million in annual recurring revenue during the first four months of 2026, up from $350 million at the end of 2025. Those figures are self-reported and cover ElevenLabs as a whole, rather than Reception. They show why a packaged small-business product is plausible now: Staniszewski and Dabkowski can reuse voice models, agent orchestration and telephony work already funded for much larger customers.
The launch also follows a sales leadership change. RuntimeWire reported on September 2nd that ElevenLabs hired former OpenAI executive Ashley Kramer as its first chief revenue officer, with enterprise customers generating 55% of revenue, according to ElevenLabs. Reception opens a separate distribution path with published pricing, automated onboarding and no sales call required.
The founders' next test sits outside the controlled demos that made ElevenLabs' voices popular. Small-business calls are irregular, interrupted and tied to real money. Callers change their minds, ask questions that are missing from the website and expect the receptionist to know when an exception matters. Reception gives Staniszewski and Dabkowski a direct consumer of their own infrastructure, and every failed booking could give them product feedback that a model benchmark cannot provide.