USA Virtual Assistant: What the Onshore Premium Buys

The Problem

The question is rarely “assistant or no assistant.” It’s whether to pay two to five times more for a USA virtual assistant than the same hours cost offshore. The offshore quote looks defensible on paper, and every service selling against it has an answer ready for why you should spend more.

Some of those answers hold up. A US-based virtual assistant genuinely changes three things: when they’re working, how they sound on a phone call to a US vendor, and how simple your answer is when someone asks where your calendar data sits. Those are worth real money, and worth knowing the price of.

What the premium doesn’t change is the shape of the thing. You’re buying a block of one person’s hours. That person has a shift, a weekend and a vacation. Your admin has none of those. The gap between “excellent assistant” and “always covered” survives every price increase in the market.

I’m Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. We built Catch to take the whole administrative load off an executive’s plate, so I spend a lot of time looking at what the human services on the other side of this decision actually sell. Below: where the onshore premium earns its money, what it costs at published rates, and where the model runs out no matter the geography.

What a USA Virtual Assistant Genuinely Buys You

There are three of them, and each is worth paying for.

Working hours that overlap yours

This is the main event. Executive admin is reactive work, and the window in which it matters is short. A client moves a 9am call at 8:40. A flight cancels. A contract comes back with one question blocking signature. An assistant eight to twelve hours away either works nights or picks it up tomorrow.

The onshore services say so plainly. BELAY describes its bench as exclusively US-based, specifically for cultural and time-zone alignment. Zirtual commits to a response during business hours within two hours, either with the finished task or an estimate of when it’ll be done. Both are promises about when, and both are reasons the onshore services give for the premium.

A native phone presence with US vendors

More executive admin still happens by voice than people expect. The hotel that won’t confirm a late checkout by email. The restaurant that doesn’t take online reservations for six. The clinic with a phone tree. Making those calls well, in a US accent, with US business norms, is a specific skill, and it’s priced as one. Zirtual sells it as a distinct product line, with dedicated agents for outbound calling work such as appointment confirmations.

A simpler position on confidentiality and data

The quietest reason, and often the deciding one. A US-based assistant may simplify time-zone alignment and contractual discussions. Location alone does not establish data residency, confidentiality, or security. Ask each provider where data is stored, which tools and subprocessors it uses, and what screening and contractual protections apply.

Some of the services build around that explicitly. Prialto holds SOC-2 Type 2 compliance and runs background checks and single sign-on as part of the service. In a regulated industry, or selling to enterprises, that line item stops being a nice-to-have.

What the Onshore Premium Costs

Here is what several of the US virtual assistant services publish, as of 2026, with Catch in there for reference.

Option	Published 2026 price	What you get for it
Catch (AI executive assistant)	Flat $99/person/month	Calendar, email, scheduling, bookings, outbound calls, and travel beta for eligible customers
Time Etc	$390/mo for 10 hours, up to $2,160/mo for 60 hours	Dedicated US-based assistant, effective rate of $36 to $39 per hour, unused hours roll over
Zirtual	$599/mo for 12 hours, up to $1,699/mo for 45 hours	Dedicated US-based, college-educated assistant with specialist backup, hours do not roll over
Fancy Hands	$35/mo for 3 requests, up to $125/mo for 15 requests	US-based team, with each standard request capped at 20 minutes of work, unused requests roll over
BELAY	Not published	Dedicated US-based assistant; BELAY states that US-based virtual assistants typically run $1,200 to $3,000 per month, or $30 to $75 per hour

Lay it out like that and two things jump out.

Hourly rate barely moves with volume. Time Etc goes from $39 an hour at 10 hours a month to $36 an hour at 60. You’re not buying leverage, you’re buying hours, and the per-hour price is close to flat. Scale the arrangement and you scale the invoice.

And the cheapest option here is priced for a different shape of work. Fancy Hands starts at $35 a month for three standard requests, each capped at 20 minutes. For discrete errands that’s a real service, and it’s a different purchase from a block of a dedicated assistant’s hours. Fancy Hands does also run a dedicated tier, where the same assistant handles all your requests and a second dedicated assistant backs them up, but it doesn’t publish a price for it.

So: roughly $600 to $3,000 a month is the honest range for dedicated US-based executive support, part-time. The full-time version of that role, hired directly, runs $120,000 to $180,000 a year once you count salary, payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and software.

Where Neither Option Solves It

All of the above is about who does the work and where they sit. The limit underneath is structural, and nobody’s fault: one person can’t be available all the time.

The industry knows it and prices around it. Time Etc includes cover when your assistant is ill or on vacation. Prialto puts a trained secondary backup on every account. Zirtual lets your primary assistant pull in another assistant when a task falls outside their expertise. Fancy Hands puts a second dedicated assistant behind the first on its dedicated tier. Good answers to a real problem, all of them, and all involving someone who isn’t your assistant doing your work for a while.

Then the hour bank. Time Etc rolls unused hours into the next month. Zirtual doesn’t, so a quiet month is money spent on hours nobody used. Either way you’re tracking a balance, which means deciding whether a task is worth the time, which is a strange thing to be doing with the resource you hired so you’d stop thinking about tasks.

Underneath all of it, admin volume is lumpy and it arrives at the wrong hours. Sunday night before a board meeting. The 10pm flight cancellation. The 7am reschedule. When what you’ve bought is a block of one person’s hours, those get worked when that person is next working. Zirtual, for instance, promises a response within two hours during business hours.

How Catch Handles the Same Work

Corporate travel booking is in beta for selected Catch customers. It covers supported flights and hotels, with approval required before purchase. Fares, room charges, and supplier change or cancellation fees are separate from the $99 per person monthly subscription. Ask about availability and supported trip types before relying on it. See the travel beta.

Catch covers the traditional executive-assistant role end to end. Calendar and conflicts, inbox triage and replies, scheduling and rescheduling, reminders, briefings, reservations, coordination with external guests, outbound phone calls, and supported business flights and hotels in beta, booked after approval. It doesn’t stop at proposing a draft for you to approve. It sends, books and confirms, then tells you what needs your attention.

Set against the onshore arrangement, three things change.

Coverage stops being a schedule. Catch is available outside business hours. No shift, no overlap window, no two-hour response target.

There’s no hour bank. It’s $99 per person a month, flat. Calls are included, with no per-call fees. You stop deciding whether something is worth spending time on, because there’s no balance to protect.

The context stays. Catch builds its picture of you from your connected calendar, email and tools, and sharpens it on the corrections you give it. It learns which relationships matter and how you like things handled. That knowledge doesn’t walk out when someone changes jobs.

On money: a fully loaded US executive assistant runs $120,000 to $180,000 a year, against $99 per person a month. And to be direct about the people part, nobody needs to be let go. The traditional admin work is handled. If you have an assistant today, they move into the operational and in-person work that software genuinely doesn’t do, which is often the part of the role there was never time for.

Key Capabilities

Calendar and scheduling, booked rather than linked

A conflict doesn’t get surfaced for you to resolve. Catch reaches out to the other party and reschedules it. It generates scheduling links on demand with whatever constraints you hand it, say a link for you and your co-founder, mornings only, next week. When someone sends you their scheduling link, Catch clicks through and books a time off your real availability and how urgent the request looks.

Email handled with judgment, not rules

Email is where contracts get negotiated and client decisions get made. The work matters. It’s the overhead around it that eats the day. Catch reads and prioritizes the inbox, decides what deserves you, drafts and sends replies in your name, and chases the quiet threads that genuinely warrant a nudge. It works from what it knows about your priorities, not a fixed rule about when to follow up.

Real outbound calls, placed for you

Catch calls the hotel about the late checkout, books the restaurant, confirms the appointment. Calls are included in the flat price with no per-call fees. It identifies itself as an AI when it dials. You can also call Catch yourself and hand off work by voice. What it won’t do is answer your incoming calls, much as a human assistant wouldn’t pick up your personal phone, and there’s no inbound number for outside contacts to ring.

Business travel, booked and then managed

For eligible beta customers, Catch finds supported flights and hotels against calendar context, meeting locations, and stated preferences. It asks for approval before purchase and can help with supported changes. Ground transport may need separate arrangements. Business travel only. Expenses, receipts and reimbursement aren’t part of it today.

Reachable where you already work

Slack, email, text message, iMessage, or a phone call. No dashboard to open, no workflows to build. You hand off work in a sentence and keep refining it in the same thread, which a draft sitting in Gmail can’t do.

Security your IT team can check

Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and a Google Verified app at CASA Tier 2, and follows your permissions when sharing information with external guests. Early on it checks with you before doing things on your behalf, and takes on more as it learns you.

Who This Is For

• Executives at US mid-market companies, 20 to 300 employees: CEOs, VPs of Sales, VPs of Operations, partnerships and business development leads carrying a genuinely heavy admin load.
• Buyers who priced an onshore assistant, agreed with the logic, and still couldn’t justify $1,200 a month and up for part-time coverage.
• Anyone whose admin is reactive and lands outside a shift: evening flight changes, early-morning reschedules, weekend prep.
• Owner-operators in law, construction, production and similar businesses who carry the admin themselves and aren’t shopping for AI tooling, just for the work to go away.
• Teams in regulated or IT-controlled environments that need a defensible answer about where calendar and email access goes.

How It Works

1. Sign up. Self-serve. No sales call, no consultation to schedule first.
2. Connect Gmail or Outlook, grant access, then connect whatever else you want Catch working with: HubSpot or Zoho, Asana or Notion, your note-taker.
3. Message it like an assistant. Slack, text, iMessage, or a phone call. The whole setup takes under three minutes.
4. Correct it as it goes. Early on Catch checks before acting. As it learns your priorities and relationships, it handles more on its own.

Results You Can Expect

The comparison most executives are running: a dedicated US-based assistant at roughly $600 to $3,000 a month for part-time hours, against $99 per person a month with no hours to track.

Day to day, coverage and speed are what change. Nothing waits for business hours. Nothing waits two hours. You stop being the routing layer for your own calendar, and you stop rationing an hour bank. Context compounds instead of resetting, so the longer Catch works with you, the less you explain.

Catch has scheduled over 5,000 meetings, handled over 200,000 emails, and taken on more than 20,000 delegated tasks. Executives at Finout, OpenWeb, Hud, ARYA and Atlas use it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

If your admin is predictable and can wait for business hours, an onshore assistant at $600 to $3,000 a month is a reasonable purchase, and the US virtual assistant services above are legitimate. If your admin is reactive, arrives at the wrong hours, and you’re tired of pricing someone else’s shift, that’s the problem we built Catch for.

Connect your calendar and email, send it a message, and see what the week looks like without the admin in it. Get Started, $99 per person a month flat, with a 10-day free trial.

Pricing sources

Primary sources for the pricing and service descriptions: Time Etc. Annual billing, eligibility, usage allowances, and add-ons can change the total; confirm terms with the provider.

Additional provider sources: Fancy Hands, Zirtual, BELAY.