The Real Cost of AI Phone Answering for Restaurants

DineCall combines a published base monthly fee with an included AI call allowance and an explicit additional-minute rate. There is no order commission or setup fee. To estimate your bill, use monthly call time rather than order count or sales revenue.

Standard, Pro and multi-location pricing

The founding base fee is CAD $199 per month per location for the first 100 partner restaurants, locked while continuously subscribed; the standard base fee is CAD $399. Starter is CAD $99/month/location with 200 AI call minutes, then CAD $0.35/min. Standard, including its founding offer, includes 1,000 AI call minutes per location per month, then CAD $0.20/min. Pro is CAD $599/month/location with 3,000 minutes, then CAD $0.15/min. Online and QR orders use no call minutes. Taxes extra. Zero order commission and no setup fee. Includes an AI phone ordering agent, a restaurant website, online ordering and reservations, QR ordering, and a unified management dashboard.

How call time changes your monthly bill

At the founding rate, 800 or 1,000 AI call minutes cost CAD $199 before tax. At 1,500 minutes, the bill is CAD $199 + 500 × $0.20 = CAD $299. At 2,000 minutes, it is CAD $399. The standard plan uses the same allowance and additional-minute rate with a CAD $399 base fee.

Phone orders, table reservations and questions all count toward the same AI call allowance, whether or not an order is completed. Online and QR orders do not use call minutes. AI-connected time is metered by the second, and allowances reset monthly without rollover.

What the numbers look like at real restaurants

King Do Seafood in Surrey, BC has taken over 100 phone orders through DineCall AI. That cumulative order count alone does not establish a monthly bill or a cost per order. Yuan’s Garden in Richmond uses the same AI line for phone orders and table reservations, both of which count toward call usage.

For Hao's Restaurant Group, three separate phone lines — Hao's Lamb Restaurant, Royal Beef, and Hao's Tapas Kitchen — all route through DineCall AI. Multi-location groups reach custom pricing by writing to hello@dinecall.ai.

What is included with every plan

The plan is all-inclusive by design. All plans cover: the AI voice host answering the phone 24/7 in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin; table reservations with real availability checks; online and QR code ordering; a restaurant website built and hosted by DineCall; the kitchen order board that consolidates phone, web, and QR orders in one view; and the customer CRM with order history. The restaurant does not pay extra for any of these as add-ons.

Setup cost and timeline

There is no setup fee. Configuration — menu digitization, bilingual translation verification, and routing tests — is typically completed in 2 to 3 business days. The restaurant keeps its existing phone number; call routing is set up through conditional call forwarding. The kitchen board starts showing orders as soon as the first call is routed.

What DineCall does not charge for

The restaurant owns its customer data and can export it from the dashboard. There is no setup fee or order commission. Published base fees and the 1,000-minute allowance apply per location; multi-location groups receive custom quotes. Additional AI call minutes cost CAD $0.20 each, before tax.

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