Four of the six restaurant voice AI vendors we checked publish a price. No two of them bill for the same thing. Certus AI charges $250 a month flat, Foreva AI starts at $250 a month, Slang AI charges $399 to $599 a month per location, and Bite Buddy charges $1.50 per completed order. Loman AI and heytruffle publish nothing and route you to a demo. Every figure here was read from the vendor’s own page on 30 August 2026.
- 1. Answer: the agent picks up the phone and handles hours and directions questions.
- 2. Qualify: it works out whether the caller wants a table or a takeout order. Reservation-first tools book the table; order-taking tools walk the caller through the menu and modifiers.
- 3. Book or escalate: it books the table, or pushes the finished ticket into the POS, which is why order-taking vendors advertise POS integrations.
Compare vendors on the billing unit (month, location or completed order), the POS integration, and what happens past the included allowance. For how per-minute voice agents are priced in general, see our small business AI receptionist cost comparison.
What the four vendors that publish a price actually charge
Read from each vendor’s own public page on 30 August 2026. Where a column says “not published”, the vendor states a price but not that detail.
| Vendor | Published price | Billed unit | Volume included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Certus AI | $250/month | Flat monthly | Not published |
| Foreva AI | From $250/month | Flat monthly | Not published |
| Slang AI | $399 Core / $599 Premium | Per location, per month | Not published |
| Bite Buddy | $1.50 per completed order | Per completed order | Pay-as-you-go or prepaid bundles |
| Loman AI | Not published | Starter and Premium, both “Contact Us” | Not published |
| heytruffle | Not published | Book a demo | Free trial of the agent itself |
Slang AI also lists an Enterprise tier at custom pricing. We could not retrieve the pricing pages for Popmenu or OpenTable Voice AI, so we make no claim about either, their absence from the table is a gap in our checking, not a finding about them.
The published low end is higher than the articles say
This is the part worth knowing before you budget. The buying guides ranking on page one quote ranges that start well below anything a vendor publishes: one puts a restaurant at roughly $150–$300 a month at 200 calls, another at $100–$300 a month, another at $50 to $500 depending on volume.
Against those ranges, the cheapest published flat price we found is Certus at $250 a month, and the category’s best-known name, Slang, starts at $399 per location. In other words the $50, $100 and $150 floors those articles anchor you to do not correspond to a published price from any vendor in this comparison. Budget from the published numbers, not from the ranges.
Flat monthly or per order? There is a clean break-even
Two of these vendors are directly comparable if you do one division. Bite Buddy publishes $1.50 per completed order. Certus publishes $250 a month flat. Dividing $250 by $1.50 puts the crossover at roughly 167 completed phone orders a month, about five and a half a day.
- Below ~167 orders/month: the per-order model costs less. At 80 orders you would pay about $120 against a $250 flat plan.
- Above ~167 orders/month: the flat plan costs less, and the gap widens fast. At 400 orders the per-order model runs about $600 against Certus’s published $250.
That arithmetic is ours, calculated from the two published rates. It is not a vendor claim and not a test result. It also only holds for the published headline figures, neither vendor publishes what happens at the edges, which is exactly what you should ask about.
Why the “best of” lists all disagree
Search any of the obvious phrases and page one fills with ranked lists that never agree on a winner. The reason is visible once you check who published each one. On the results we read on 30 August 2026, Momos’s list named Momos, Dapta’s named Dapta “best overall”, CloudTalk’s named CloudTalk first, Bland’s named Bland, Virstack’s named its own agent “Best Overall”, SevenRooms’s named SevenRooms Voice AI, and Bite Buddy’s named its own system.
None of that is necessarily dishonest, a vendor is entitled to argue its product is best. But it does mean the ordering is a marketing decision rather than a finding, and it explains something otherwise odd about this category: a single Reddit thread in r/restaurant outranks almost all of them on the main search terms. Owners are looking for someone with nothing to sell.
Reservations or orders? They are different products
The sharpest line in this market is not price, it is scope. Some tools answer the phone, book a table, and handle hours, directions and menu questions. Others take a full takeout order, modifiers, substitutions, upsells, and write the ticket into your POS, which is why they advertise Toast, Square and Clover integrations so prominently.
A reservation tool and an order-taking tool are not competitors even when they cost the same, and comparing their prices without checking which is which is the most common way restaurants end up disappointed. If your phone problem is missed takeout revenue, a booking-first tool will not solve it at any price.
Four questions to settle before you sign
- What exactly am I billed for? A month, a location, a minute, or a completed order. Get the unit in writing.
- What is included, and what happens when I exceed it? None of the four vendors that publish a price publishes the volume that price includes.
- Is it per location? And what does my actual site count make the monthly bill?
- Does it write into my POS? Or does a human still key the order in, which removes most of the labour saving.
A vendor that will not answer the first question before a demo has told you something useful about how the rest of the relationship will go.