Do Spam Calls Count Against Your Minutes? Spam Screening and Billing, Explained

It is one of the first questions people ask before they trust an AI to answer their phone, and it is a fair one: if I am on a low-cost plan, do spam and junk calls eat the minutes I paid for?

The short answer is no. Here is exactly how it works, and why a spammer would have to get very lucky to ever cost you anything.

Spam is screened before it reaches your agent

Every number we provision runs on our telephony partner's network, which has built-in inbound screening for US and Canada numbers. It combines STIR/SHAKEN attestation with number reputation, and it is enabled by default in Reject mode, meaning flagged calls are blocked at the network edge and never reach your agent at all.

This is on for every plan, Starter included, at no extra cost. When you subscribe and pick up a number, we make sure it is switched on before you start using it.

Rejected calls use zero minutes

Because flagged calls are blocked before they get to us, they consume zero minutes. There is nothing to bill, because the agent never picked up.

And even for the calls that do come through, the billing is built to be fair:

• We do not start counting until 30 seconds into a call, so a call that wraps up in a few seconds costs you nothing.
• Past that, we bill in 30-second increments rather than full minutes, so every second you are charged for is time the agent was actually working for you.

Three layers of protection, all tunable

Screening catches the vast majority. For anything that slips through, three more limits stand between a junk call and your minutes. Every default below is set for you out of the box, and you can tighten any of them from the dashboard the moment you want to:

• Daily call limit per caller. Default is 5 calls per day from the same number. You can drop it to a strict one-call-per-person-per-day policy, or raise it if your business is genuinely high-frequency.
• Per-call maximum duration. Adjustable all the way down to 30 seconds. Any call, spam or genuine, physically cannot outlast this cap.
• Silence timeout. Default 3 minutes, and you can shorten it to hang up faster on dead-air callers.

Stack those together and a spammer would have to get past our partner's screening, be a first-time caller, stay under your daily call cap, and keep talking through the silence timer, all just to burn a single minute. That is a very short list of spam that could ever cost you anything.

Low cost does not mean unprotected

This matters most on an affordable plan, where every minute counts. The point of a low-cost AI answering service is not to cut corners on protection, it is to give a small business the same call handling a big one pays a call centre for, without the price tag. Spam screening and these limits are part of that, on by default, included on Starter, tunable whenever you want more control.

The best way to know if it fits your business is to try it. Give Starter a run, and if it is not doing what you need, reply to your welcome email and we will refund you personally. No forms, no back and forth.

Want to see it in action? Watch a low-cost AI answering service screen spam and cap junk calls.