Most owners arrive at this question the same way. The admin work crossed some line, a Tuesday evening went to invoices, and the thought lands: someone else should be doing this. Then the search starts, and it splits in two directions. Hire a person. Or buy software that claims to act like one.
The price difference is enormous, and it makes the choice look obvious. It isn't. The number on the invoice is the smallest part of what each option costs you.
What a virtual assistant actually costs
In the US, a virtual assistant runs about $24 to $26 an hour. That range shows up consistently across ZipRecruiter, Indeed and Glassdoor, and Indeed put the figure at $25.73 an hour as of April 2026. Offshore, the same role goes for $7 to $15 an hour, and the gap is mostly time zones and language, not competence.
Hire one full time through an agency that handles the vetting and the replacement, and small businesses land somewhere between $1,988 and $2,500 a month.
That buys you a person. A person notices that a client sounded off on the phone. A person walks into a bank. A person can be trusted with the thing you can't write down as a rule.
What an AI assistant costs, and what it asks back
The tools in this category cluster tight. Alfred is $24.99 a month. Motion is $19. Carly is $35. Fellow is $7. Team0 runs from $29 to $149 depending on how much of your week you hand over. Call it $19 to $50 a month for one person's admin.
So the math looks like forty to one, and the decision looks made.
That comparison misses the work. Every one of those tools is a thing you operate. You connect the accounts. You set the rules. You check what it drafted before it goes out. You learn where it's reliable and where it isn't, and that learning takes weeks. Reviews of these tools put the ramp at two to four weeks before the drafts sound like you.
Nobody prices that. It's your evening, so it's free on the invoice and expensive in life.
The cost nobody puts on the page
There's a third thing you're buying in both cases, and it's the one that decides whether this works: who holds the context.
Context is knowing that "her" means the client from Thursday, that this particular customer always pays eleven days late so the reminder should go out early, and that the meeting request from a supplier belongs in the Friday block and not on Monday morning.
A virtual assistant builds that context over months, and it lives in their head. When they leave, it leaves with them.
Most AI tools never build it at all. They act on the message in front of them. You supply the context every time, which is why using them feels like managing a very fast intern who forgot everything overnight.
So the choice turns on who has to remember, and the monthly price tells you almost nothing about that.
Where a person still wins
We build an AI assistant, so take this section as the part where we argue against ourselves.
A person wins when judgment is the job. Firing a supplier, handling a customer who is properly angry, negotiating something where tone decides the outcome, sitting in a room. Anything physical belongs to them too. So does the task with no precedent, where there's no rule to follow, only taste.
And a person will tell you that you're wrong. Software doesn't push back on a bad decision, and sometimes that's what the business needed most.
If most of your week is those things, hire a human. The money is worth it and no tool will cover you.
Where Lagoda sits
Lagoda is an AI chief of staff you talk to in a messenger, by voice or text. It's built for the third case, the one that neither option above serves well: you don't want to manage software, and you're not ready to hand a stranger the keys to your whole schedule.
You send it a voice note between calls. It chases what you're owed, sends the invoice, moves the meeting, dials the call you keep putting off, keeps your contacts straight, and hands you one brief at 7:30. It carries the context itself, so "draft her a quote" is a complete instruction.
It answers only to you. It doesn't read your other chats and it doesn't talk to your customers. Nothing irreversible moves without your ok.
Access runs by request rather than a signup button, and setup takes about a week, because it gets shaped around how you actually work rather than how a settings page thinks you should.
And to be straight about the limits: it doesn't sit in the room, it doesn't negotiate for you, and it doesn't tell you your plan is bad. Those are still yours.
Common questions
Is an AI assistant cheaper than a virtual assistant?
On the invoice, yes, by a wide margin. A managed full time VA runs about $2,000 a month for a small business, while AI assistant tools sit between $19 and $50. The comparison only holds if the tool doesn't hand the work back to you in the form of setup, review and correction.
Can I use both?
That's what most growing businesses land on. The AI takes the repetitive volume, the invoices, the chasing, the scheduling, and the person handles judgment and anything that happens face to face. The split usually sorts itself out within a month.
What does a virtual assistant do that AI can't?
Anything physical, anything that needs a relationship, and anything with no precedent. A VA can also tell you that you're wrong, which matters more often than it sounds.
How long before an AI assistant is useful?
With most tools, two to four weeks, because you're teaching it your patterns while also checking its output. With Lagoda, setup runs about a week and we do it with you rather than handing you a configuration screen.
Does an AI assistant see my customer conversations?
With Lagoda, no. It lives in its own thread and knows only what you tell it there. Some other tools work by connecting to your inbox, which is a different tradeoff, and worth reading closely before you connect anything.