A reader emailed last week asking: should I hire an admin for $50k or use an AI receptionist for $149?
Wrong question. The right one is: which mix of the two does your business actually need?
This post is the maths, the honest comparison, and the decision framework. Spoiler: for some tradies the answer is "hire the admin". For others it's "AI all the way". For most it's "both".
What an admin actually costs
A part-time admin in Australia in 2026, 25 hours a week, runs about $1,000 per week loaded:
- Wage at $35/hour = $875/week
- Super (12%) = $105/week
- Annual leave + sick + super on those = ~$140/week amortised
- Workers comp, payroll tax (above threshold) = ~$60/week
Round it: $52,000/year for a part-time admin who works business hours Monday to Friday.
Add the recruitment cost (a real number — Hays surveys put it at $5-8k for an admin role), the management overhead (1-2 hours a week of your time at conservatively $80/hour = $5,000/year), and the cost of being short-staffed when they're sick or on leave (about 4 weeks a year of "nobody answers the phone").
Real loaded annual cost: $60-65k.
A full-time admin doubles that. Real loaded cost about $90-100k for someone who's there all day every weekday.
What an AI receptionist costs
Sanby's pricing is the easy comparison because I can quote it without lying:
- Starter $149/month = $1,788/year (50 calls/month)
- Growth $299/month = $3,588/year (200 calls/month)
- Pro $599/month = $7,188/year (700 calls/month)
Reception HQ (a real human service, for fairness): $119-$330/month depending on volume. Same range.
So the cost gap between an AI/human receptionist and a part-time admin is roughly 15-20x. That's not a small difference. There needs to be a real reason to pick the more expensive option.
When the admin is the right answer
The admin wins when the work is not just call answering. Specifically:
- Quoting and invoicing in Xero / MYOB. The AI can take details. The admin can build a quote from a job description, send it from your software, follow up if it's been a week.
- Supplier ordering and tracking. Knowing that your wholesaler had a price rise on copper this morning, or that the order due Tuesday is now Friday because the ship's been delayed.
- Emergency triage during business hours where a real human's judgement matters. ("Mrs Henderson called saying her husband fell off the ladder, she's panicking, can you ring her now") — an AI flags it, but a human can call her back from your number while you drive over.
- Customer relationship building. Your repeat customers want to chat. They want to know how the apprentice's footy season went. An AI can be polite. It can't be friendly in the way that retains a residential customer base for ten years.
- Compliance work. Maintaining your test-and-tag log, scheduling annual safety inductions, chasing the ATO when GST is overdue. This is real work, it takes hours, an AI doesn't do it.
If your business has more than about 15 hours a week of this kind of work, the admin economics start to make sense. If you're spending evenings doing it yourself instead of being with your family, the admin probably already pays for itself in your reclaimed hours.
When the AI is the right answer
The AI wins when the only function the admin would serve is answering the phone. Specifically:
- You're a sole-trader on the tools 8 hours a day. Your "office work" is 30 minutes at the end of the day. Hiring someone for that is silly. Pay $149/month, get every call answered, get the booking confirmed during the call.
- Most of your calls happen outside 9-5. A part-time admin works business hours. If 60% of your call volume is between 6pm and 9am (very common for plumbers, locksmiths, sparkies on emergencies), an admin only catches 40% of it. Voicemail handles the rest, and we've covered what voicemail does to your conversion rate.
- Your booking process is straightforward. "Half day, full day, emergency. Wednesday 9am works, Thursday 2pm works." Three appointment types and a calendar. An AI does this perfectly. It does not require human judgement.
- You can't tolerate the variable cost of human absence. Sole traders carry no buffer. If your one admin is sick on Tuesday, you're back to voicemail Tuesday. The AI doesn't get sick.
For about 70% of solo and small (1-3 person) tradie businesses, this is the shape. The AI receptionist is the right answer. You'd be paying $60k for what $1,800 would deliver.
The hybrid that actually works
For businesses in the awkward middle — three to ten staff, one or two trucks running, some after-hours volume — the right answer is usually both.
- AI handles the phones, 24/7. Every call gets answered. Bookings go straight to the calendar.
- Part-time admin (15-20 hours, business hours) handles the not-phone work. Quoting, invoicing, supplier orders, GST returns, customer relationship work. A real human at the desk while the AI handles the line.
The admin doesn't have to be on call. They don't have to interrupt their work to grab the phone. They get to do the actual high-leverage admin work the business needs, and the phone keeps converting calls when they're at lunch.
We see this pattern with a lot of our customers. The admin role gets better: they go from "person who answers phones and does some admin" to "person who runs the office while the phone runs itself". Lower turnover, more interesting work, less stress.
The decision framework
Three questions:
1. How many hours a week of office work does your business actually need? If it's less than 5: AI alone. If it's more than 20: hire the admin and use AI as overflow. If it's 5-15: depends on point 2.
2. What share of your call volume is outside business hours? If 30%+: AI is mandatory regardless of admin decision. If under 10%: an admin can absorb most of the load.
3. Can you afford the variable cost of human absence? If you have multiple staff who can fill in: admin works fine. If you're solo and one person being sick equals no business that day: AI is your safety net.
Most sole traders score "AI alone". Most 5-10 person crews score "both". Almost nobody who actually does the maths concludes "admin only" — voicemail catches too few calls outside business hours for it to make sense.
Two scenarios
To make this less abstract, two real-shape examples I've worked through with customers in the last quarter:
Sparkie in Geelong, sole trader, 80 calls/month, 50% after hours. Admin maths: $60k buys a part-time person who covers half his call volume. AI maths: $149/month covers all of it including the 40 after-hours calls that admin would have missed. AI wins by an embarrassing margin.
Plumbing crew on the Sunshine Coast, 6 staff, 350 calls/month, 25% after hours, $40k of unbilled jobs from late invoicing last year. Admin maths: hire a part-time admin to clear the invoice backlog and run the office. That's worth $30-40k in recovered revenue alone. AI maths: $299/month for 200 calls plus overage. They need both. They were paying for neither.
The pattern: tools-on-the-truck businesses use AI alone. Office-and-tools businesses use both.
What we don't recommend
Don't hire a full-time admin to "answer phones". The maths is bad and the work is boring; they'll leave inside a year. If you have the volume to justify a full-time hire, use them for what an admin actually does best (operational work) and let an AI handle the inbound.
Don't pay for an AI plus a full-time admin both doing call answering. The AI takes 95% of the calls cleanly; the admin doing call answering on top is double-billing. Use the admin for everything else and let them route the genuinely hard calls (existing customer disputes, complex emergencies) to themselves via the AI's escalation path.
Don't pay $300+/month for an AI plan if you only get 30 calls a month. Sanby's Starter is $149/50; Reception HQ's lowest is $119/25. Buy what fits your actual volume.
The honest pitch
Sanby is the AI side of this for Australian tradies. $149/month, 14-day free trial, books the job during the call. If you decide an admin is the right answer for you instead, that's a defensible call too.
The point of this post is that "AI vs admin" is a false choice for most businesses. It's "AI plus the right amount of admin", and the right amount depends on what your business actually does outside the phone.
If you want the comparison piece against other AI / human services, it's here.