Heyline vs Abby: minutes by plan, or by person.

Abby Connect (Abby) is a human answering service that now sells AI answering out of the same pot of minutes, where one AI minute costs half a human one. Heyline sells only the AI part: a lower entry price, more talk time in the plan, and a test drive you run yourself first.

Prices checked September 2, 2026 on each vendor's own pages. Abby publishes one table covering both halves of the service. It starts at $165 a month for 50 Abby Minutes, which their pricing page says is 50 minutes of a person, or up to 100 minutes of their AI. Heyline Starter is $99 a month and includes 200 minutes on one business.

So this is not a tie at the entry price. It is $99 a month for 200 minutes against $165 a month for up to 100 AI minutes, before you count the calendar booking, transcripts and email recaps included at that price. What the difference buys on Abby's side is people, and for some shops that is worth more than the minutes.

More than a price row shows. Abby does not gate features by tier: their site puts appointment booking, English and Spanish answering, round-the-clock coverage with no after-hours upcharge, encrypted recordings and their whole integration list on every plan, month-to-month, with no setup fee. Their scheduling reach is wider than ours — Google Calendar, Calendly and Acuity among them — and they say they will build a missing integration during onboarding at no charge.

The bigger thing is the one no AI-only product can answer. Abby's AI can warm-transfer a live caller to a US-based receptionist mid-call, on the same plan, out of the same minutes. Heyline has no transfer to a person, at any price. If the calls that hurt are the ones that need someone to calm a customer down, that is worth paying for.

One caveat cuts our way and we will state it carefully: Abby publishes no help center or technical pages, so nothing first-party describes how their booking checks your free time. We cannot tell you it is shallower than ours, and we will not.

Divide each published plan by the minutes it includes. On Abby's table an AI minute works out between $1.38 and $1.65, and a human minute between $2.76 and $3.30. Heyline's included minutes work out at $0.50 on Starter, $0.40 on Growth and $0.33 on Scale.

Overage is where the two part company. Abby publishes a policy but no dollar rate: extra minutes bill at your plan's own Abby Minute rate, and you can move up a plan at any time. Heyline has no per-minute overage. You get an email at 80% of your minutes, and at 100% a $10 top-up adds 20 more automatically, with a monthly spend cap you can set on our pricing page.

Pick on what your calls actually are. The typical home-services shop books 42% of its inbound calls (ServiceTitan platform data, 3,000+ US/CA trade shops, 2022), and shops with fewer than five technicians book 24%. If what you are dropping is ordinary booking calls, the cheaper minute is most of the argument, and you can hear how she handles one before you commit to either.