· AI Workforce · 3 min read
The Hour Cap on Virtual Assistant Packages
Virtual assistant packages bill by the hour and cap your month at 40 hours. An AI digital employee bills per role. Here is the math on both.
A 40-hour virtual assistant package costs $1,480 a month at Time Etc, a U.S.-based assistant service. The 20-hour package is $760 and the 10-hour one is $390. Those figures came off the company’s public pricing page on October 26, 2026.
Packages like these are sold in hours because the product is a person with a fixed week. The cap is the point of the model. It also breaks in a predictable place: the month when the work doesn’t fit.
The month it doesn’t fit
Support work arrives in clumps. Invoices pile up at month end. One client onboarding week can turn email into a full-time job for several days. If you bought 20 hours and the month needed 26, you either upgrade to the 40-hour tier at $1,480, push the remainder into your own evenings, or let it wait until next month.
Time Etc rolls unused hours into the next month, which is better than most, and you still paid for hours that did nothing. The cap penalizes a quiet month and a busy one. A January with a handful of invoice reminders and a March with three customers asking where their orders went cost you the same, or cost you an upgrade you’ll barely use in April.
The math behind the hourly rate
Ten hours at $390 works out to $39 an hour. The 60-hour tier drops to $36. That same page cites Payscale for an experienced executive assistant at $60,500 a year in 2026, so the agency rate is already the efficient version of a hire: no benefits or payroll tax, and no months of ramp before someone learns which customers get escalated.
Scale it up and the year gets expensive fast. The 40-hour tier, bought for twelve months, is $17,760. That is a fair price for forty hours a month of a trained person’s attention. It is a bad price for the twenty extra hours a busy quarter needed, or the eight a slow month did not.
What an AI digital employee charges for
EchoAI pricing is per role, not per hour. Starter is $299 a month for one digital employee running one workflow during business hours. Growth is $999 a month for up to three roles across channels. A month where the shared inbox takes 60 hours of somebody’s time costs the same as a month where it takes 10. There is no tier to upgrade to when volume spikes, and no rollover credit sitting unused in February.
The jobs that move over cleanly are the ones with a repeatable pattern: order status replies, invoice reminders, appointment confirmations, and sorting an incoming queue so a person only sees the threads that need one. The work that should stay with a person is the judgment. An unusual refund, a changed contract term, an angry customer who might leave: those need someone who can weigh the situation, and a person is still cheaper than being wrong.
Running the split on your own last month
Write down every task you sent to a virtual assistant in the last month, plus the ones you did yourself because nobody else had time. Put an hour estimate next to each entry. Then separate the pile: tasks where last month’s steps would work just as well next month, and tasks where the decision needed you.
Price the first pile at $299 a month for one Starter role. Price the second pile at $37 to $39 an hour, the going rate for packages. If the second pile is small, most of what you were buying was repetition at a judgment price.
Book a demo and we’ll run that split on one of your real workflows, with your numbers.
