Virtual Assistant Packages: How the Pricing Actually Works

The Problem

Most providers on your shortlist sell the same shape of thing. You buy a block of hours or a block of tasks each month, you spend it down, and you choose the block before you have any real idea what next month holds. Tier names differ. Hourly rates differ. But virtual assistant price packages are nearly always a bucket, and the hard part of buying one is guessing the size.

I am Nir Sabato, co-founder of Catch. We build an AI executive assistant that handles calendar, email, scheduling, reminders, bookings, and real outbound phone calls for executives at US mid-market companies, and we charge a flat $99 per person a month with no bucket at all. I have a stake in how you read this, so here are the mechanics straight. What goes wrong with package pricing is not the rate. It is the sizing, and that is the one thing a price list cannot tell you. Below is how these packages get built, what the published 2026 tiers look like, and the exact point where the model gives out.

How Virtual Assistant Price Packages Are Built

Nearly every virtual assistant service package runs on four mechanics. Learn the four and you can read any published price list in the market, and you will know what to ask about the ones that are not published.

The bucket. You prepay for a monthly allocation. Usually hours of assistant time, sometimes a count of separate requests. Work gets logged against it and deducted as it is done.

Expiry or rollover. At the end of the month, whatever you did not use either carries forward or vanishes. This one term moves the real cost of a package more than the headline rate does, and the published terms differ. Time Etc rolls unused hours over to the following month. Fancy Hands rolls unused requests forward on its standard request plans and lets them accumulate as long as you stay an active member. Zirtual’s hours do not roll over from month to month.

Overage. What happens when the bucket runs dry mid-month. This is the one to get answered in writing before you sign, because it decides what a heavy month actually costs.

Volume discount. The effective rate per hour drops as the block grows, which is what makes a block bigger than your current workload look like the better buy.

The published 2026 packages

This is what the market looks like wherever providers publish real numbers, with Catch in there for reference:

Provider	Published packages	Terms that change what it costs
Catch (AI executive assistant)	Flat $99/person/month	No bucket. Nothing to size, nothing to spend down, no per-call fees.
Time Etc	US rates: $390 for 10 hours, $760 for 20, $1,480 for 40, $2,160 for 60	Unused hours roll over to the next month. No setup fee. Switch plans or cancel at any time. Custom larger plans on request.
Zirtual (Virtual Assistants plans)	$599 for 12 hours and 1 user, $899 for 20 hours and 2 users, $1,199 for 30 hours and 3 users, $1,699 for 45 hours and 4 users	Hours do not roll over. Month to month, no long-term contract.
Fancy Hands (standard request plans)	$35 for 3 requests a month, $55 for 5, $125 for 15	Priced in requests rather than hours, with each standard request defined as up to 20 minutes of work. Unused requests roll over and accumulate while your membership is active. A separate dedicated-assistant tier is billed to the minute, at a price Fancy Hands does not publish.
BELAY	Not published.	BELAY’s own cost guide puts typical US-based virtual assistant pricing, market-wide, at $1,200 to $3,000 a month for part-time support, or $30 to $75 an hour. Those are its figures for the market, not its own rates.

Two things jump out. The gap between a task plan and an hour plan is not a discount, it is a different product: 15 requests of up to 20 minutes each is not the same help as 20 hours of a dedicated assistant’s attention, even when the monthly figures sit close together. And the comparison only works where the numbers are published. Where they are not, there is nothing to set beside the price list, so the published tiers end up anchoring a decision they only partly describe.

The Rate Falls, Which Is Why You Overbuy

Volume pricing is real, and it is consistent. Time Etc’s US 10-hour plan works out to $39 an hour, its 60-hour plan to $36. Zirtual’s entry plan lands around $50 an hour at 12 hours and around $38 an hour at 45.

That slope is why the larger tier looks like the smart buy. Every tier up is better value per hour, so buying forward into the block you expect to grow into starts to feel like the rational move. Where the allocation expires, buying forward means paying every month for hours you will not use, in exchange for a lower rate on the hours you do.

The discount is also small. Moving from Time Etc’s smallest published block to its largest cuts the effective rate by about eight percent while multiplying the monthly commitment by about five and a half times. That is not a cheaper assistant. It is a much larger prepayment.

Where Bucket Pricing Breaks

Executive admin does not arrive evenly. That is the flaw, and no amount of careful tier selection fixes it.

Picture an actual month. Three ordinary weeks where the calendar mostly holds, the inbox is manageable, and nothing needs chasing. Then your board meeting moves, two clients escalate over email on the same afternoon, a Chicago trip lands on the calendar, and nine meetings have to be rebuilt around the new dates. That week is not a little above average. It can run several times the other three weeks put together.

A bucket gets sized on the average. Size for the average and you run dry in the week the work actually counts. Size for the peak and you prepay three quiet weeks every month to be covered for one. Inside the model there is no third option, and that produces three fairly predictable outcomes.

You under-buy and get rationed. You hit the ceiling mid-month, in the week with the least slack in it, and now you are haggling over an upgrade or an overage bill with the board deck still unfinished.

You over-buy and subsidize. You carry a tier sized for your worst week through all the ordinary ones. On a plan where hours expire, that money is simply gone.

You start watching the clock. This is the quiet one, and it does the most damage. Once hours are finite, you begin triaging your own delegation. A task that would cost an assistant four minutes does not feel worth four minutes of a finite block, so you handle it yourself. The package is now deciding which work you hand off, which is backwards. You bought the package to stop making those calls.

How Catch Prices This Differently

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 is a flat $99 per person a month. No bucket, no hour allocation, no request count, no credit system, no per-call fees. Nothing expires at the end of the month because nothing was allocated in the first place.

The sizing problem goes away with it. You do not forecast next month’s admin volume, and you do not switch plans when a quiet quarter turns heavy, because there is no higher tier to switch to. The busy week costs what the quiet one costs.

The clock-watching goes too, and that is the part that genuinely changes how you work. When handing something over carries no marginal cost, the four-minute thing goes over as readily as the four-hour thing, which is how delegation is supposed to work.

Two other differences matter more than the price. Catch is available around the clock and can respond outside business hours. Zirtual, for comparison, promises a response within two hours during your business hours. And Catch acts: it books the meeting, sends the email, places the call. The whole point of delegation is that the work finishes without coming back to you.

Key Capabilities

Conflicts settled, not surfaced

Catch watches your calendar continuously, catches conflicts as they form, reaches out to the other party, and settles the new time. Scheduling gets handled and booked, right down to clicking through a scheduling link somebody sends you and picking a slot based on your real availability and how urgent the request is.

Email that gets sent, not left in drafts

Email is where contracts, negotiations, and client decisions happen, and Catch treats it that way. It reads and triages what comes in, handles routine replies on your behalf, and brings you the things that genuinely need you with enough context to decide. When a thread goes quiet and it matters, Catch judges whether a nudge is warranted and chases it. The overhead shrinks; the work does not matter any less.

Calls placed on your behalf

Catch places outbound calls on your behalf to get real things done: a hotel reservation, a restaurant booking, a late checkout, an appointment. You can also just call Catch and talk through your day, hand over tasks, or pass along context by voice. On calls it self-identifies as an AI agent. Calls are included in the $99, with no per-call fees. Catch does not pick up your personal incoming calls, for the same reason a human assistant does not.

Judgment, not a rules engine

No workflow builder here, and no if-this-then-that rules to maintain. Catch learns your priorities, your key relationships, and how you like things handled, from your connected calendar and email and from the corrections you give it. It weighs what matters, handles the routine quietly, and flags what needs your attention. Early on it checks with you before it acts; as it picks up how you work, it handles more on its own, and in everything it does it verifies the details before acting on your behalf rather than guessing.

Security and compliance

Catch holds SOC 2 Type II and CASA Tier 2.

Who This Is For

• Executives at US mid-market companies who have priced virtual assistant pricing packages and still cannot decide which tier to buy
• Founders and CEOs whose admin load swings hard week to week, where no fixed bucket of hours fits
• Leaders already on a package who catch themselves rationing what they delegate to protect the hour balance
• COOs and chiefs of staff weighing a managed virtual assistant retainer against a flat software cost
• Anyone whose assistant need sits in calendar, email, scheduling, reminders, bookings, and phone calls rather than physical or in-person work

How It Works

1. Sign up and connect Gmail or Outlook. Under three minutes, fully self-serve. No dashboard to learn, no workflows to build.
2. Connect anything else you use. Slack, HubSpot, Zoho, Asana, Notion, your note-taker.
3. Start delegating wherever you already work. Slack, email, text message, iMessage, a voice note, or a phone call.
4. Confirm the first few actions. Catch checks with you while it is still learning your preferences and relationships.
5. Hand over more. As the picture sharpens, Catch runs more end to end and surfaces only what genuinely needs you.

Results You Can Expect

The admin that used to land on your plate stops landing. Conflicts get resolved before you notice them, routine email gets answered without a draft sitting around waiting for approval, and supported meetings and reservations get booked. Eligible beta customers can also approve supported flight and hotel purchases. The cover is continuous: Catch is available outside business hours.

The cost stops moving too. A fully loaded US executive assistant might cost $120,000 to $180,000 a year in a senior-role budget, depending on location and experience. Catch is $99 per person a month, flat, in a heavy month and a light one. To be clear about what that means: nobody needs to be let go. The traditional admin role gets fully handled, and the person in it grows into the operational and in-person work Catch does not cover.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get Started

If you are stuck between an hour block you will overspend and one you will underuse, you are solving the wrong problem. Connect Gmail or Outlook, start delegating in Slack or by text, and see how a week goes when what you hand over is not capped by a balance. Flat $99 per person a month, 10-day free trial, no tier to size.

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.