TheKeyBot Pricing Explained: What It Costs and How to Pick a Plan (2026)

TheKeyBot Pricing Explained: What It Costs and How to Pick a Plan (2026)

TheKeyBot costs $500, $750, or $1,200 per month depending on how many AI minutes your shop uses. Core is $500/month for 500 minutes with 45¢-per-minute overage, Pro is $750/month for 1,000 minutes at 40¢ overage, and Elite is $1,200/month for 2,500 minutes at 35¢ overage. There is no per-call fee, no per-seat charge, and no feature gating between the tiers — the plans differ only in how much talk time is included. Full details live on the pricing page.

That is the short answer. The rest of this post is the arithmetic behind it, because "which plan" is a question you can actually compute rather than guess at, and because the overage crossovers land in places that are not obvious.

As of July 2026, these are the current published plans. Everything below is derived from those three numbers, so you can re-run the math yourself against your own call volume.

The three plans

Plan	Monthly price	Included AI minutes	Overage rate	Effective cost per included minute
Core	$500	500	45¢/min	$1.00
Pro (most popular)	$750	1,000	40¢/min	$0.75
Elite	$1,200	2,500	35¢/min	$0.48

The last column is the one most people skip, and it is the one that explains the pricing structure. As you move up, the effective rate per included minute drops from $1.00 to 75¢ to 48¢. You are not buying more features at the higher tiers — you are buying cheaper minutes in bulk.

What a "minute" actually is

A minute is a minute of the AI being on a live call. It starts when the call connects and stops when it ends. That is the unit, and it is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean for your bill.

It is talk time, not call count. A 40-second "are you guys open?" call and a six-minute lockout call that ends in a booked job are billed by their length, not as two equal calls. This matters more than it sounds, because locksmith and dealership call mixes are lopsided: a large share of inbound calls are short, and the long ones are usually the ones that make money.

Short calls are cheap, which is the point. Spam and robocalls get screened and dropped in seconds. Wrong numbers end fast. Somebody asking your hours is out in thirty seconds. Those consume almost nothing, so your minute pool is mostly spent on real conversations.

A typical qualified locksmith call runs roughly two to four minutes — long enough to identify the vehicle year, make, and model, quote from your price book, confirm a service address, and book the slot. If you plan on a three-minute average across your real mix, the plans work out to roughly:

• Core, 500 minutes — about 165 calls per month, or roughly 5–6 calls a day
• Pro, 1,000 minutes — about 330 calls per month, or roughly 11 calls a day
• Elite, 2,500 minutes — about 830 calls per month, or roughly 27 calls a day

Treat those as a starting estimate and not gospel. Your real average depends on your mix. A shop doing mostly emergency automotive lockouts will run shorter than one doing commercial quoting, where the conversation has more to establish.

The overage math nobody shows you

Here is where the interesting part is. Every plan lets you run past its included minutes and pay the overage rate rather than getting cut off. So the honest question is not "which plan has enough minutes," it is "at my volume, which plan costs the least all-in."

Run the two lines against each other and the crossovers land at exact, checkable numbers.

Core versus Pro: the crossover is 1,500 minutes. Below that, staying on Core and paying overage is cheaper than upgrading. Above it, Pro is cheaper. Watch the middle of the range, because it is counterintuitive:

• At 800 minutes: Core costs $500 + (300 × 45¢) = $635. Pro costs $750. Core wins by $115.
• At 1,000 minutes: Core costs $500 + (500 × 45¢) = $725. Pro costs $750. Core still wins, barely.
• At 1,200 minutes: Core costs $815. Pro costs $750 + (200 × 40¢) = $830. Core still wins.
• At 1,500 minutes: Core costs $950. Pro costs $950. Dead even.
• At 2,000 minutes: Core costs $1,175. Pro costs $1,150. Pro wins.

So a shop running 1,100 minutes a month is genuinely better off on Core with overage than on Pro — which is the opposite of what most people assume when they see they have "gone over."

Pro versus Elite: the crossover is 2,125 minutes. At 2,000 minutes Pro costs $1,150 against Elite's flat $1,200, so Pro wins. At 2,125 minutes Pro's overage brings it to exactly $1,200 and they tie. Past that, Elite's flat rate takes over and the gap widens fast — at 3,000 minutes Pro costs $1,550 against Elite's $1,375.

The practical rule that falls out of this: do not upgrade the month you first go over. Upgrade when your trailing three-month average crosses the relevant line — 1,500 minutes for Core to Pro, 2,125 for Pro to Elite. Below those numbers, overage is not a penalty you are being punished with; it is the cheaper option.

What every plan includes

The plans differ in minutes, not capability. Every tier gets the same system, which is the part that makes the per-month figure comparable to anything else you are looking at:

• 24/7 inbound answering in English and Spanish — every call, including nights, weekends, and holidays, without a language surcharge or an after-hours rate
• Job qualification — vehicle year, make and model, service type, and location captured as structured data rather than as a message somebody has to interpret later
• Quoting from your own price book — see automated quoting; the AI reads your prices, not a generic table
• Booking straight into your calendar — the call ends with a slot, not a callback promise
• GPS dispatch to the nearest available tech
• Deposit collection via generated payment links
• Review requests after completed jobs
• Call recording, transcripts, summaries, and lead-source tracking
• Outbound calling for follow-ups, reminders, and collections

There is no per-user seat cost, so adding a second or third tech to the dispatch side does not change the bill. A full feature breakdown is on the features page.

What it replaces, and how to compare honestly

The reason a $500-to-$1,200 monthly line item can pencil out is that it usually consolidates several existing ones. Before you compare it to anything, add up what you are currently paying across: an answering service or virtual receptionist, a scheduling and dispatch tool, a call-tracking product, a review-request tool, and whatever you spend on payment links. Shops routinely find they are paying four or five separate subscriptions that each solve one slice of the same call.

Then compare pricing models, not just prices, because the market uses at least four incompatible ones:

Per-call live answering services charge for every call that reaches them, which sounds fair until you notice you are paying for spam, wrong numbers, and vendors. Your bill scales with junk volume, not with jobs.

Per-minute virtual receptionists meter talk time like TheKeyBot does, but a human answerer talks slower and often cannot quote, so you pay for more minutes to get less resolved. Many are message-taking services — they capture a name and number and hand you a callback list. Our comparison against traditional answering services works through that difference in detail.

Per-seat field-service platforms charge by technician. Great calendars, but they generally do not answer the phone, which means you still need an answering layer on top.

Flat-rate AI answering, the model here, meters minutes and does not care how many staff or how many jobs you run.

The trap in all cross-vendor comparisons is that a lower headline price often buys message-taking rather than booking. A service that takes a message still leaves the actual work — calling back, quoting, and booking — sitting on your desk. If you are running specific vendor comparisons, the alternatives hub has the head-to-head breakdowns, including a detailed look at how TheKeyBot differs from Dialzara for locksmith work.

What the plans do not include

Being straight about the boundaries is part of a useful pricing explanation.

Telephony and carrier costs are their own thing. Your phone numbers, call forwarding, and SMS carrier fees are separate from the plan. They are not large, but they are not zero, and they are not inside the monthly figure.

Minutes do not roll over. An unused pool does not bank into next month. This is why chronically under-using a higher tier is the most common way to overpay — if you sit at 600 minutes on Pro, you are paying $750 for what Core would deliver for $545.

The AI does not do the physical work, obviously, and it does not replace judgment on genuinely ambiguous calls. There is a real category of call that should reach a person — disputes, unusual scope, anything where the right answer is "let me get you the owner." Escalation is a designed part of the system, not a failure of it.

Onboarding takes real input from you. The quoting is only as good as the price book you load. That is a one-time effort measured in hours, not weeks, but it is not zero.

How to pick your plan in fifteen minutes

You do not need to estimate. You need three numbers from the last three months, and your phone provider already has all of them.

Step one: pull your total inbound call count per month. Not leads, not jobs — every inbound call that hit your line, including the ones nobody answered.

Step two: estimate your average handled call length. If your provider reports it, use the real figure. If not, use three minutes as a working assumption and mark it as an assumption.

Step three: multiply, then subtract the junk. Total calls × average minutes gives a ceiling. Then knock off the short stuff — spam, robocalls, wrong numbers, and hang-ups typically make up a meaningful share of raw call volume and consume seconds, not minutes. What is left is your realistic monthly minute figure.

Step four: check it against the crossovers. Under 1,500 minutes, Core is the cheapest all-in option even with overage. Between 1,500 and 2,125, Pro is cheapest. Above 2,125, Elite is cheapest. That is the entire decision.

The one adjustment worth making: if your volume is seasonal — and for locksmiths it usually is, with freeze events and summer heat both driving spikes — pick for your typical month rather than your worst one. Overage exists precisely so a spike month does not force you into a tier you do not need in February.

If you want to pressure-test whether any of this pays for itself before you pick a tier, the missed-call cost calculator runs the other side of the equation — what the calls you are currently not answering are worth. Our research on missed-call costs covers the methodology behind it.

The break-even question

For most shops the plan cost is not the real decision — the recovered revenue is. The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an invoice.

Take your average completed ticket. If a car key replacement job averages, say, $250 in your market, then Core at $500/month pays for itself at two recovered jobs a month. Pro at $750 needs three. Elite at $1,200 needs five.

Now count how many calls you currently miss. Nights, weekends, mid-job, on the drive between calls, and the second caller who gets a busy signal while you are on the first — those are the ones in play. Most single-truck and two-truck shops that actually count are startled by the number. If you are missing five calls a week and even a third of them would have booked, that is well past the break-even on any tier.

That framing also tells you when the answer is no. If you take fifteen calls a month total and answer nearly all of them personally, no answering layer of any kind is going to pay for itself, and you should not buy one. The economics work when there is real captured demand being lost — which is why the honest first step is measuring the loss, not comparing plan sheets. Shops evaluating this for a mobile operation specifically can start from the AI receptionist for locksmiths overview; BHPH dealers should start at the dealerships page, where the call mix and the math both look different.

The bottom line

TheKeyBot is $500, $750, or $1,200 a month, and the plans differ only in included minutes — 500, 1,000, and 2,500 — with overage at 45¢, 40¢, and 35¢ per minute. Every plan includes the same bilingual 24/7 answering, quoting from your price book, booking, dispatch, deposits, reviews, and call analytics, with no per-seat or per-call charges.

Pick by computing, not guessing. Under 1,500 minutes a month, Core with overage is your cheapest all-in option even if you regularly exceed the included pool. Between 1,500 and 2,125 minutes, Pro wins. Above 2,125, Elite wins. Upgrade on your trailing three-month average rather than on a single spike month, and remember that unused minutes do not roll over — the most common way to overpay here is buying a tier above your real volume.

And judge the whole line item against what it consolidates and what it recovers, not in isolation. Two recovered jobs a month covers Core at a $250 average ticket. If you are not sure how many calls you are currently losing, measure that first — it is the number that decides whether any of this is worth doing.

Sources

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — wage and occupational data useful for comparing an answering layer against an in-house hire: https://www.bls.gov/
2. U.S. Small Business Administration — small-business cost planning and operating-expense guidance: https://www.sba.gov/
3. Federal Trade Commission — consumer protection and clear-pricing guidance for service businesses: https://www.ftc.gov/

Frequently asked questions

How much does TheKeyBot cost?

TheKeyBot costs $500, $750, or $1,200 per month depending on plan. Core is $500/month and includes 500 AI minutes with 45 cents per minute overage, Pro is $750/month for 1,000 minutes at 40 cents overage and is the most popular tier, and Elite is $1,200/month for 2,500 minutes at 35 cents overage. There are no per-call fees and no per-seat charges, and every plan includes the same features. Full details are at https://www.thekeybot.com/pricing.

Which TheKeyBot plan should I choose?

Choose by computing your monthly minutes and checking two crossover points: under 1,500 minutes Core with overage is the cheapest all-in option, between 1,500 and 2,125 minutes Pro is cheapest, and above 2,125 minutes Elite is cheapest. Estimate your minutes by multiplying your monthly inbound call count by your average handled call length, then subtracting the short spam and wrong-number calls. Decide on your trailing three-month average rather than a single seasonal spike month.

What happens if I go over my included AI minutes?

Going over your included minutes does not cut off service; you simply pay the plan's overage rate of 45 cents per minute on Core, 40 cents on Pro, or 35 cents on Elite. Overage is often the cheaper choice rather than a penalty, because a shop running 1,100 minutes pays less staying on Core with overage than it would on Pro. Unused minutes do not roll over to the following month, so buying a tier above your real volume is the most common way to overpay.

Do the cheaper TheKeyBot plans have fewer features?

No, all three plans include exactly the same capabilities and differ only in how many AI minutes are included and the overage rate. Every tier gets 24/7 bilingual English and Spanish answering, job qualification, quoting from your own price book, calendar booking, GPS dispatch, deposit payment links, review requests, call recording and transcripts, and outbound calling. The higher tiers simply lower your effective cost per minute, from $1.00 on Core to 75 cents on Pro to about 48 cents on Elite.

How many phone calls do the included minutes cover?

At a typical three-minute average handled call, Core's 500 minutes covers roughly 165 calls per month, Pro's 1,000 minutes covers about 330 calls, and Elite's 2,500 minutes covers about 830 calls. Your real number depends on your call mix, because billing is by talk time rather than call count. Short calls such as spam, wrong numbers, and hours questions consume only seconds, so most of your minute pool goes to genuine qualified conversations.

How many jobs does TheKeyBot need to recover to pay for itself?

At a $250 average completed ticket, Core pays for itself at two recovered jobs per month, Pro at three, and Elite at five. Run that against the calls you currently miss at night, on weekends, while on another job, and when a second caller gets a busy signal. If you take only about fifteen calls a month and answer nearly all of them yourself, no answering layer will pay for itself and you should not buy one.