Certus AI pricing, plans and limits

Last updated: 2026-10-15

Certus AI is a phone agent for restaurants from Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch. The vendor says it answers in under a second, handles 1,000 calls at once and reports 98.6% accuracy. It takes pickup and delivery orders and OpenTable bookings in English and Spanish, then hands the orders to the restaurant's POS system.

About Certus AI

Certus AI is an AI phone agent for restaurants, made by Certus Inc. in San Francisco and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch. It answers the restaurant's phone line, takes pickup and delivery orders item by item, books tables, answers questions about hours and the menu, and sends confirmed orders to the point-of-sale (POS) system the kitchen already uses. Its YC profile says the founders built it after watching restaurant clients lose orders to unanswered phones, which is the single problem the product is shaped around.

A call works like this. The agent picks up, asks whether the order is for pickup or delivery, confirms sizes and add-ons, reads the total back and takes a name and callback number. Payment can go out as a texted secure link, be taken by card over the phone, or be left for the register. The homepage names Toast, Square, Clover, Skytab and Aloha NCR as POS connections and OpenTable for reservations, and a dashboard logs every call, order and booking. If no POS connection is used, orders can be taken through the dashboard instead.

Read the numbers as a seller's numbers. The accuracy, response-time and recovered-revenue figures on the homepage come from the vendor and from owner-supplied case studies, and none states a test method. There is also no free plan or self-serve sign-up, because every call to action leads to a demo booking. The page does not publish a call-minute cap, a per-location rate, a SOC 2 or PCI statement, or the speech and language models behind the voice, so a chain or a buyer with security rules has questions to ask before signing. Pricing is a single flat monthly plan, covered in the cost section below.

Certus is a finished product for one industry, so it competes differently from the developer platforms on HokAI. Retell AI and Vapi suit teams that want to design their own call flows, and Bolna targets calls in Indian languages. Phone agents built for other trades include Toma for car dealerships and NexusCall AI for service businesses. HokAI's guides to the best AI voice assistants, customer support tools and AI assistants for small business cover the wider field, the voice assistant directory lists the rest, and Smart Match can shortlist a phone agent for your use case.

Pricing

One flat plan: the vendor's homepage comparison table lists $250 a month for the plan that includes ordering, Terms shown: no setup fee, no contract, billed monthly. The page also says there are no order fees and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. Arithmetic on an assumed $25 average ticket: the plan is covered after 10 recovered orders a month.

The homepage gives no cap on call minutes, no per-location rate and no price for reservations only, so ask for those in the demo. Developer platforms you build on yourself, such as Retell AI, are a different kind of purchase. com on 2026-10-15.

Key Features

• Phone orders: Order capture for pickup and delivery: confirms each item's size and add-ons, reads the total back and records spoken delivery addresses.
• POS handoff: Pushes confirmed orders into the restaurant's POS (Toast, Square, Clover, Skytab or Aloha NCR) as if staff had typed them in, or to a printer or the Certus dashboard.
• Reservations: Checks availability and confirms tables through OpenTable, and adds notes such as a birthday to the booking.
• Payments by phone: Collects payment by texted secure link, by card over the phone through an encrypted POS connection, or leaves it for the register, and can reuse a saved card for returning guests.
• Call capacity: The vendor says it picks up in under a second and handles 1,000 calls at the same time, with no hold music or busy signal.
• Spanish and accents: Spanish is included as standard, the agent is trained on many accents, and the voice is customised for each restaurant.
• Call and order dashboard: Lists every call, delivery, reservation and order handled, and a private chat with the team stays open after sign-up.

Pros

• A flat monthly price with a refund window lowers the cost of testing it on one location before rolling it out to others.
• The homepage names its POS partners and its reservations link, so an operator can check fit before booking a demo.
• Case studies name real restaurants and owners with call counts (Boardwalk Pizza reports 5,000+ calls handled), which is easier to check than anonymous logos, although every figure is owner-reported.

Cons

• No free plan or self-serve sign-up is visible, so you cannot try Certus before talking to sales.
• The homepage states no call-minute cap, no per-location price and no security attestation, so multi-location chains and buyers who need SOC 2 or PCI evidence must ask.
• Headline results such as the 98.6% accuracy figure are vendor-reported with no stated test method, and the sample calls are curated recordings.
• A young company with a published team of 8, so long-term support and roadmap are unproven.

Visit Certus AI Official Website