Open five VA companies’ websites and you will read the same page five times: vetted assistants, flexible plans, get your time back. The marketing converges because the promise really is the same. What differs, and what decides whether the arrangement works for you, is the structure underneath. Who actually does the work. Where that person was hired. Who trains and supervises them. What happens when they are unavailable. And how all of that gets converted into one monthly number.
Those five choices explain almost every price on the market, and almost every complaint about it. Learn to read them and you can size up a VA company you have never heard of in about ten minutes, using nothing but its own pricing and FAQ pages.
What follows walks through each structural choice, with eight researched companies as worked examples: Wing Assistant, Fancy Hands, Zirtual, Time Etc, BELAY, Prialto, Magic and Athena. Catch sits in the comparison as a different structure altogether, an AI executive assistant that handles the administrative role for a flat $99 per person a month rather than selling you a share of someone’s week.
How the Eight Are Built
| Provider | Who does the work | Where staff are based | How you pay | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Catch | AI executive assistant, no assistant to brief or manage | Software, no staffing model | Flat monthly, voice included, no per-call fees | $99/person/month |
| Wing Assistant | Dedicated assistant under a Customer Success Manager | Not confirmed in our research; a separately priced US-based tier is offered | Monthly plan priced by role and hours | $699/month for 80 hours |
| Fancy Hands | Shared pool on request plans; one matched assistant on the dedicated tier | 100% US-based | Request credits, or billed to the minute on the dedicated tier | $35/month for 3 requests |
| Zirtual | Dedicated assistant, specialist backup for unfamiliar tasks | US-based, college-educated | Monthly hour bucket, hours expire | $599/month for 12 hours |
| Time Etc | Dedicated assistant, holiday and sickness cover included | US-based, UK-based for UK clients | Monthly hour bucket, hours roll over | $390/month for 10 hours |
| BELAY | Dedicated contractor placed by a Client Success Consultant | Exclusively US-based | Onboarding starts with a sales call | Own tiers not listed |
| Prialto | Dedicated assistant plus trained primary and secondary backups | Not confirmed in our research | Not confirmed in our research | Not stated here |
| Magic | Dedicated assistant with AI tooling, plus a 24/7 concierge | Not confirmed in our research | $0 until a hire is made | Not stated here |
| Athena | One dedicated full-time EA, 1:1 and not shareable | Not confirmed in our research | Flat subscription for the whole person | $3,000/month on annual billing |
Where a cell says a price is not stated here, it is because the provider does not list one or we could not confirm a current figure. That is structural rather than an oversight, and the pricing section explains what it usually signals.
Structural Choice One: Shared Pool or Dedicated Assistant
This is the first fork in the road, and it probably shapes your experience more than price does.
A shared pool routes each request to whoever is free. Fancy Hands’ standard plans are pooled, request-based plans: you submit by phone, web, text, email, the mobile apps or by assigning a Trello card, and a standard request is defined as up to 20 minutes of work. For self-contained errands with a clear finish line, that shape is efficient. The structural cost is context. A pooled plan does not promise you the same person twice, so what you explain on one request does not necessarily travel to the next.
A dedicated assistant fixes the context problem by assigning one person. Wing, Zirtual, Time Etc, BELAY, Prialto, Magic and Athena all work this way, and they say so loudly, because it is the first thing buyers ask about. Fancy Hands also sells a dedicated tier: the same person handles all your requests, billing is to the minute with no task credits, and the published scope covers inbox management, light bookkeeping, file organization, purchases, calendar management, vendor research and CRM maintenance. That tier’s price is not published.
Dedication comes in degrees, though, and the degree is worth checking. Athena states its terms flatly: the EA is dedicated to one client and cannot be shared with a co-founder or an executive team. Time Etc goes the other way on purpose, letting one assistant be shared across your internal team at no extra cost and letting you add further assistants to the account for free. Zirtual lands in between, giving you one primary point of contact who does the vast majority of the work, and letting that person pull in another Zirtual assistant when a task falls outside their expertise.
Structural Choice Two: Where the Staff Are Hired
Hiring location is one of the largest inputs into the price, and the fastest way to see it is a provider that prices domestic staff as its own product.
Wing does that. Its general virtual assistant is $699 a month for 80 hours or $999 for 160 hours, its executive assistant starts at $1,299 part-time and $1,999 full-time, and its US-based virtual assistant starts at $2,499 part-time and $4,999 full-time. Where a US-based tier carries its own price, well above the general plans, ask where the assistants on each tier are hired before you compare any rates.
Several of the eight build the offering around domestic hiring. Fancy Hands states that all of its assistants are based in the USA, and describes its dedicated assistants as experienced US-based employees rather than gig workers. Zirtual advertises US-based, college-educated assistants as a core requirement. Time Etc advertises US-based assistants, with UK-based assistants for UK clients, and asks applicants for five to eight years of relevant experience. BELAY sources exclusively US-based talent and frames it as cultural and time-zone alignment.
BELAY also publishes what domestic talent costs in general: a typical US-based virtual assistant, it says, runs $1,200 to $3,000 a month, or $30 to $75 an hour. Useful as a market yardstick, even though BELAY stops short of listing its own tiers.
Athena is the instructive case at the other end. For $3,000 a month on annual billing you get one dedicated full-time EA working 40 hours a week across five business days, which is a whole person rather than a slice of one. Where Athena hires is not something we could confirm, and the same is true of Prialto and Magic, so with all three that is a question to put to them directly before you compare any rate.
Structural Choice Three: How the Work Gets Priced
Four pricing shapes cover the entire market, and each one quietly changes how you behave.
The hour bucket. You buy a block of hours per month and the assistant tracks time against it. Zirtual runs $599 for 12 hours, $899 for 20, $1,199 for 30 and $1,699 for 45, month to month with no long-term contract. Time Etc runs $390 for 10 hours, $760 for 20, $1,480 for 40 and $2,160 for 60, which it publishes as an effective rate of $36 to $39 an hour, with no setup fee. Wing’s general plans are buckets too, at 80 or 160 hours a month.
One clause inside the bucket matters more than the headline number: rollover. Time Etc’s unused hours roll over to the next month. Zirtual’s do not. The same shape produces a different month: hours that expire have to be used or lost, which puts the burden of watching the clock on you.
Request credits. Fancy Hands’ standard plans are $35 a month for 3 requests, $55 for 5 and $125 for 15, with unused requests rolling over for as long as the membership stays active and the option to set tasks to repeat. The 20-minute definition of a standard request is the line to read twice, because it caps how far any single request can travel.
Billed to the minute. Fancy Hands’ dedicated tier drops credits entirely, bills to the minute with no contract, and adds a secondary dedicated assistant, a support team leader, weekly usage reports and a project manager for larger projects. HIPAA-certified assistants are available. The price is not published.
Flat subscription for a whole person. Athena charges $3,000 a month on annual billing, or $3,600 a month month-to-month after an initial 90-day commitment, and you buy the full 40-hour week rather than a slice of it.
Then the fourth category, which is really the absence of one: no price list. BELAY publishes what US-based assistants cost in general but stops short of listing its own tiers, and its onboarding opens with a sales call, so the number comes out of a conversation. Magic is promoted as $0 until a hire is made and offers four weeks free for a referral. For Prialto, read the rates on its own pricing page rather than ours, because figures move. Quote-only is not a red flag by itself. It does tell you the price depends on scope, which means the number you eventually hear is negotiable and the comparison gets harder.
One number frames all four shapes. 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. Every published fractional price above sits below that, because what you are buying is part of someone’s month. Athena is the exception that prices the whole person.
Structural Choice Four: Training and Supervision
An assistant is only as useful as the management layer behind them, and this is where the published detail varies most.
Wing keeps a Customer Success Manager over the relationship, supplies a Workspace app for task management, chat, file sharing and process documentation via a screen recorder, and replaces a poor fit within 24 hours at no extra cost. Its privacy policy also discloses that Wing may use screen-monitoring and keystroke tracking on assistants for quality assurance, and may monitor or record calls made on the platform. Worth knowing on both sides of the arrangement.
Zirtual handles hiring, vetting, interviewing and ongoing management itself, and commits to a response during business hours within two hours containing either the finished task or an estimated completion time. A response-time commitment is one of the more useful things a VA company can publish, because you can measure it.
Time Etc sets its bar at the recruitment stage with that five-to-eight-year experience requirement, then backs it with a lifetime satisfaction guarantee and free replacements when a match is not working.
BELAY spends the effort on matching instead: a sales call, a discovery call with a Client Success Consultant, a manual placement from its vetted bench, then a kickoff call. Four steps before any work starts.
Prialto publishes its data-handling posture in detail, citing SOC 2 Type 2 compliance, background checks and single sign-on with password management, and its assistants use AI tools in their own workflows.
Magic pairs you with a dedicated human assistant and gives those assistants unlimited paid access to leading AI tools, with a 24/7 concierge standing behind them.
Athena surrounds the assistant with a Partnership Manager, EA performance management, and a Delegation Training Library for the client, on the fair premise that executives have to learn to hand work off. Its security posture is hardware-led: assistants work only on Athena-owned, secured MacBooks with remote wipe, VPN, endpoint detection and device management, personal devices are prohibited, and assistants undergo third-party background checks. They are also issued an Enterprise ChatGPT license and Apple AI tools.
The pattern worth noticing: the better-supervised the model, the more of the price is management rather than labor. That is what you are buying, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are paying for.
Structural Choice Five: Holidays, Sick Days and Turnover
A person works a shift. Several companies on this list have built explicit answers to that, which is the clearest evidence that the problem is real.
Time Etc includes sickness and holiday cover in the plan. Prialto puts trained primary and secondary backup assistants on every account, specifically to keep things moving when the main assistant is unavailable. Magic runs a 24/7 concierge for urgent work or when your assistant is offline, and full-time executive assistant clients get 10 hours of it a week at no charge. Fancy Hands’ dedicated tier includes a secondary dedicated assistant. Zirtual’s backup is scoped differently, aimed at tasks outside the primary assistant’s expertise, where another Zirtual assistant can be pulled in.
Turnover is the harder version of the same problem, because what it costs you is the context you spent months building. Wing answers it with a replacement inside 24 hours at no extra cost. Time Etc answers it with free replacements and a lifetime satisfaction guarantee. Either way, the frustration is rarely about the replacement arriving. It is about re-training the new person, so ask what a handover actually involves on your account.
One structural note to close this out. Athena’s 40-hour week over five business days is a precise statement of what you are buying: a full-time week, on business days. Where a provider does not state its coverage that plainly, cover and continuity are terms to settle before you sign.
What a Different Structure Looks Like
Catch is not a VA company. It is an AI executive assistant, and the reason it belongs in a structural comparison is that it answers those same five questions with different answers.
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.
No pool and no dedicated person, so there is no context to rebuild and no match to get right. No hiring location, so the price is not a function of a labor market. No hours to buy, no bucket to run down, no rollover clause to read, because the price is $99 per person a month flat whether you delegate five things a week or fifty, with voice included and no per-call fees. No briefing time billed back to you. And no shift, holiday or handover, because Catch is available outside business hours.
What it handles is the traditional executive-assistant role, in full. It runs the calendar and contacts the other party directly when two things collide. It triages the inbox, drafts what you actually meant, sends it, and chases the threads that have gone quiet when they matter. Scheduling is booked rather than handed back as a link, with times chosen from real availability and the urgency of the request. It reminds you of what is coming and flags what needs your attention. It makes reservations, offers supported business travel booking in beta and keeps managing the trip afterwards, places outbound calls on your behalf, and updates HubSpot or Zoho when a deal moves. You reach it from Slack, email, text message, iMessage or a phone call.
Three things shape how it behaves. It acts rather than proposes, because a draft sitting there waiting for your approval is still your task, and it verifies details before doing anything on your behalf. It applies judgment rather than rules, learning your priorities, relationships and preferences from connected calendar and email and from the corrections you give it, so that “schedule time with John” when there are three Johns can be inferred from context the way a good assistant would. Autonomy is earned: early on it checks before acting, and it handles more on its own as it learns you.
On security, Catch is SOC 2 Type II certified and Google Verified at CASA Tier 2. Two limits are worth stating plainly: it does not do expenses, receipts or reimbursement today, and it does no in-person or physical coordination. It places outbound calls but does not answer your incoming ones, and there is no inbound number outside contacts can call.
None of this requires letting anyone go. Set against the $120,000 to $180,000 a year a fully loaded US executive assistant costs, $99 per person a month is a different order of expense, but headcount reduction is not the point. If you already have an assistant you value, Catch taking the traditional admin load frees a capable person for the operational and in-person work that genuinely needs a human in the room.
How to Read Any VA Company in Ten Minutes
Six questions, all answerable from the provider’s own pricing and FAQ pages:
- Pool or dedicated? If it is a pool, assume you will re-explain context. If it is dedicated, ask whether the person can be shared across your team, and whether the dedication survives a busy month.
- Where are the assistants hired? If a domestic tier is priced separately, ask where the assistants on the standard tier are hired.
- What exactly am I buying with the monthly fee? Hours, requests, minutes or a whole person. Then divide the price by the hours and compare like with like.
- Do unused hours roll over? That one clause changes how the whole month feels.
- Who covers holiday, sickness and turnover, and is it in the price? Named backups and included cover are a more concrete answer than a general promise to replace someone.
- Is the price published at all? If not, expect a sales process, and get the rate, the minimum commitment and the notice period in writing before you sign.
Who Should Choose Which
Choose Catch if you need:
- The administrative role handled end to end, without budgeting hours or briefing a person
- One flat price that does not rise as you learn to delegate more, at $99 per person a month with voice included
- Coverage at any hour, with availability outside business hours and no holiday, shift or handover
- Scheduling, inbox work, reminders, reservations, outbound calls and business travel booked and actively managed
- Setup in minutes rather than a consultation and a matching process
Choose a VA company in these narrower cases:
- You need physical or in-person work done, which no software model covers
- You want one accountable human across both business and personal life, which is Athena’s design, covering household, medical and family logistics alongside the business admin, and which Prialto extends to personal as well as business travel
- You have occasional 20-minute errands rather than an ongoing load, where Fancy Hands’ $35 request plan is the cheapest published entry price on this list
For the ongoing executive admin that sits in between, which is most of the demand these companies are built to serve, Catch looks like the stronger structure, because supported work is handled and the monthly price stays the same however much of it you hand over.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a VA company?
A VA company recruits, vets and manages remote assistants, then sells you access to them on a subscription. The company carries the hiring and HR burden; you delegate the work. What varies from provider to provider is whether you get a shared pool or one dedicated person, where that person was hired, and whether you buy hours, requests or a whole week.
Which VA company is best?
For the work most buyers are actually trying to hand over, which is ongoing executive admin, Catch is a fit: supported executive admin handled from request to completion for a flat $99 per person a month, with no hours to budget and no match to get right. One case that favors a VA company is needing a single accountable human across both work and personal life, covering household, medical and family logistics as well as the business admin, which is Athena’s design.
How much do VA companies charge?
Published entry prices on this list run from $35 a month for three short requests to $3,000 a month for a dedicated full-time EA on annual billing. Dedicated plans on this list start in the hundreds: $390 a month for 10 hours at Time Etc and $599 for 12 hours at Zirtual, both US-based, and $699 for 80 hours at Wing’s general tier. BELAY puts the general US market at $30 to $75 an hour.
Why do some VA companies not publish a price?
Because the price depends on scope, hours and role, so they quote it after a conversation. BELAY publishes a general market range but not its own tiers, and its onboarding starts with a sales call. Fancy Hands publishes its request-plan prices but not the price of its dedicated tier. Ask for the rate, the minimum commitment and the notice period in writing.
Dedicated assistant or shared pool: which should I pick?
Pick a pool only for self-contained errands with a clear finish line. For anything ongoing, pick dedicated, because a pooled plan does not promise you the same person twice and the context travels with the person. Fancy Hands sells a separate dedicated tier where the same person handles all your requests.
Are US-based virtual assistants worth the premium?
For work that leans on nuance, time-zone overlap and talking to your customers, many buyers think so, which is why Fancy Hands, Zirtual, Time Etc and BELAY all build around US-based staff, and why Wing prices a US-based tier separately from $2,499 a month part-time. What the premium buys is a particular person, not extra hours.
What happens when my virtual assistant goes on holiday?
That depends entirely on the provider, and it is one of the best questions to ask early. For example: Time Etc includes sickness and holiday cover, Prialto assigns trained primary and secondary backups to every account, Magic runs a 24/7 concierge for when your assistant is offline, and Fancy Hands’ dedicated tier includes a second assistant. Catch has no shift to cover and works around the clock.
Do unused hours roll over?
Sometimes, and it is worth checking before you sign. Time Etc rolls unused hours into the next month, and Fancy Hands rolls unused requests over while your membership stays active. Zirtual’s hours do not roll over. Catch has no hour bucket, so there is nothing to lose at month end.
Can a VA company handle phone calls?
Several can. Wing’s assistants handle inbound and outbound calls, SMS and live chat, Magic takes on tasks that need a person on the phone, Zirtual sells dedicated outbound calling agents as a separate line, and Athena issues assistants a US phone number through Zoom for calls such as hotel bookings. Catch places outbound calls on your behalf with voice included in the $99 and no per-call fees, and can talk with you directly; it does not answer your incoming calls.
Can I use Catch alongside a VA company?
Yes. Catch takes the calendar, inbox, scheduling, reminders, bookings and calls, which usually leaves a much smaller and more specialised brief for a human, concentrated on the operational and in-person work that software does not cover.
Get Started
The choice is between buying hours and having the administrative work handled. Catch is $99 per person a month, flat, with a 10-day free trial and setup in under three minutes. Connect your email, say what is on your plate, and see how much of next week it takes off you.
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: Wing, Fancy Hands, Zirtual, Athena, BELAY.