Voco vs Face for Business

Face for Business vs Voco: which suits your business?

Face for Business is a UK answering service staffed by named human PAs, with plans published from £49 a month. Voco is an AI receptionist charged at 29p a minute ex VAT with no monthly fee and no contract. The short answer is that Face for Business suits businesses that want a person who learns their accounts over time, and Voco suits businesses that want every call answered instantly at a predictable per-minute cost, including out of hours. Prices on this page were checked on 4 September 2026 against Face for Business's published pricing page.

What Face for Business charges

Face for Business publishes three plans, which already puts it ahead of most of the UK market on transparency.

• Taster, from £49 per month. Core business hours, a starting point for new customers.

• Message Only, from £99 per month. Message taking with a dedicated lead PA.

• Inclusive Minutes, from £115 per month. Adds evening and weekend cover, appointment booking and CRM integrations.

Their published terms include no setup or onboarding fees, billing by the second rather than rounded up, and a 7-day free trial. They also state they do not charge for sales or nuisance calls on the Message Only and Inclusive Minutes plans, though that exclusion does not appear on the Taster plan. It is a good policy and worth knowing about.

What Voco charges

Voco's pay as you go is 29p a minute ex VAT with no monthly fee. You load credit, calls draw down against it, and you top up when you want to. There is no contract and no minimum. Monthly plans are available if predictable billing suits you better.

The practical difference is where the floor sits. A business taking twenty short calls a month pays Face for Business at least £49 before a single call is answered. The same business on Voco pay as you go pays only for the minutes those twenty calls actually use.

That reverses at volume. A business taking hundreds of long calls a month may well find an inclusive-minutes plan cheaper per call than any per-minute rate, and if that is you, run the numbers rather than taking anyone's word for it.

Who actually answers

This is the real decision and it is not really about price.

Face for Business uses named human PAs. A person picks up, and over time that person learns your business, your regulars and the things that are not written down anywhere. For businesses where the caller relationship is the product, that matters more than the invoice.

Voco is AI. It answers on the first ring, it answers ten calls at once, it never has an off day and it costs the same at 2am as at 2pm. It follows the rules you give it and captures what you tell it to capture. It does not build a relationship with your regulars in the way a person does, though it does remember repeat callers and pick up where the last conversation left off.

Neither is better in the abstract. They are different products for different problems.

Out of hours is where the models diverge most

On Face for Business, evening and weekend cover sits on the Inclusive Minutes plan at £115 a month or above. On the Taster plan at £49, cover is core business hours.

Voco charges one rate at every hour. A 9pm Sunday call costs 29p a minute, the same as a Tuesday at 11am. For emergency trades, out-of-hours property maintenance and anyone whose enquiries arrive when the office is shut, that difference compounds quickly.

What to ask before you choose either

1. How many calls a month do you actually take, and how long is the average one? Most people guess high on volume and low on duration.

2. What proportion arrive outside 9 to 5?

3. What happens on your busiest hour, when several people ring at once?

4. Do your callers need a relationship, or do they need an answer?

5. What are you paying now for the calls you miss?

Voco's missed call calculator will do the arithmetic on the last one.

The honest summary

Choose Face for Business if you want a named person answering, your call volume is steady enough to justify a monthly plan, and business-hours cover is enough.

Choose Voco if you want every call answered including out of hours at one rate, you would rather not pay a monthly fee for a quiet month, or you regularly get more calls at once than you have people to answer them. You can read Voco's rate on the pay as you go page.

Both publish their prices, which between them makes this an unusually easy comparison to check for yourself.