Personal assistant service
There are three ways to get help: a human personal assistant or concierge, an offshore or online virtual assistant service, and an assistant that works by phone. They price by three different units, which is why comparing them on price alone goes wrong. The real question is whether a task needs judgment or just needs to get done. lydoh only claims the second half.
The money
Federal wage data and the providers' own pricing pages. Nothing here is an estimate we made up, and every conversion shows its arithmetic so you can redo it.
$23.23an hour
Median pay for secretaries and administrative assistants in the United States as of May 2025, or $48,310 a year. This is what the person is paid, not what an agency charges you.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025
$18.73an hour
Median pay for concierges, a separate federal occupation (SOC 39-6012), as of 2025. Annual median $38,950, with 50,200 people doing the job.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025
$39.00an hour
The published rate on the smallest Time etc plan: $390 a month for 10 hours. Their larger plans step down to $38, $37, and $36 an hour. BELAY's own FAQ puts US virtual assistants at $30 to $75 an hour.
Source: Time etc and BELAY pricing pages, 2026
$39a month
Lydoh Personal, flat, with up to 20 phone tasks a month. That is $1.95 a task, and it is the only column on this page priced by the outcome instead of by the clock.
Source: Lydoh pricing, 2026
Show the math
Disclosure: Lydoh sells the AI option, so read the comparison knowing which side we are on. Every figure above is linked at the bottom of this page. Fetch them yourself and redo the division.
Context worth sitting with: 3,515,600 people worked as secretaries and administrative assistants in 2025, and federal projections put the occupation at a 2 percent decline through 2035. Concierges, at 50,200 people, are projected to grow 3 percent over the same decade. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025. The desk job is shrinking while the errand job grows a little. That is not a victory lap for software. It suggests the part of assistant work that survives is the part that needs a person in the room.
The decision table
Take your own list for the last two weeks and run it down this table. The columns are the three ways to get help. The marks are ours, and the Lydoh column is deliberately the most restrictive one on the page.
| The task | Human PA or conciergePriced by the hour or the salary | Virtual assistant servicePriced by the hour or the request | AI by phoneWhere Lydoh sits, priced by the task |
|---|---|---|---|
| Book a service appointment: dentist, mechanic, groomer, tailor | WorkableWorks, and costs an hour of someone's day for a five-minute call. | WorkableWorks if the business takes email or has a booking link. Many do not. | Good fitOne call, one outcome, read back before hanging up. |
| Reschedule or cancel something already on the books | WorkableFine, and the least interesting thing you can buy an hour of. | WorkableFine, with the same phone problem if the place only answers a phone. | Good fitThe reference number and the new window are all it needs. |
| Get a quote, with a cap on what counts as acceptable | Good fitA person can push back, and sometimes pushing back is the job. | WorkableGood at collecting quotes, slower at the ones that need a phone. | Good fitIt asks, it reports, and it refuses anything over your cap. |
| Sit on hold with an airline, a carrier, or a utility | WorkableWorks, and you are paying full rate for hold music. | WorkableWorks, same problem, usually billed by the hour. | Good fitNo hourly meter running while nobody picks up. |
| Research and compare vendors, then write it up | Good fitJudgment about what matters to you is the whole task. | Good fitThis is what a virtual assistant service is genuinely good at. | Out of scopeNot in this release. Lydoh has no research or document tools. |
| Manage your inbox, triage email, draft replies | Good fitNeeds to know your relationships, not just your rules. | Good fitThe classic offshore or online virtual assistant job. | Out of scopeNo email access at all. Lydoh works by phone and text. |
| Travel planning with real tradeoffs | Good fitSomeone has to decide between the cheaper flight and the better arrival. | Good fitOptions assembled, tradeoffs laid out, you choose. | Out of scopeIt can call one hotel. It cannot plan a trip. |
| Gifts and personal shopping | Good fitTaste is the deliverable, and taste is a person. | WorkableGood at sourcing once you have described what you want. | WorkableIt can call a shop to check stock and size. It cannot choose. |
| Anything involving a card number, a deposit, or a signature | Good fitWith a written mandate and someone accountable for it. | WorkableCommon, and the reason VA contracts have liability clauses. | Out of scopeLydoh does not pay, does not sign, and will not be talked into it. |
| Screening the calls coming in to you | WorkableA real gatekeeper, at a real salary. | Out of scopeAlmost never included. A VA works your queue, not your phone line. | Good fitUnknown numbers screened, messages taken, VIPs rung straight through. |
Here is the claim this whole page rests on: most of what people hand a personal assistant service is not knowledge work at all. It is a phone call somebody has to make, with one known outcome, and buying those by the hour is the wrong unit. Paying $39.00 an hour makes you ration the four-minute calls, so they sit on your list for a month instead.
Test it against your own life rather than taking our word for it. Keep a note for two weeks of every errand you wished someone else would do. Mark each one as either a single phone call with a known outcome, or something needing research, writing, or a judgment call. If fewer than half land in the first bucket, we are wrong about you, and an hourly virtual assistant service is the better buy. We think most people land above half. We would rather you checked.
Disclosure again, because this is the section where it matters: Lydoh sells the AI option. The test above is designed to be able to come out against us, which is the only kind of test worth printing.
How it works
Four steps, no app to learn. The whole interface is a phone number you text, which is the point: the thing that replaces phone calls should not require you to open software first.
The first line of every outbound call
Hi, this is Lydoh calling on behalf of Maya Chen. I would like to book a table for two on Friday around seven, if you have it.
Who it is, then who it is calling for, then the ask. Never the other way around, and never without the first two.
Lydoh always identifies itself as your digital assistant. It never claims to be a person, and asked directly it says so and carries on helping. It uses your name to identify the booking, never to pass as you. Every call is recorded and transcribed, so you can hear exactly how your name was used.
Your name is on the call. An assistant that hides what it is will eventually embarrass the person it works for. The disclosure costs four seconds and removes the whole category of problem.
The fair version
Plainly, because a page that only argued one way would not be worth reading. There are whole categories here we cannot do and are not trying to.
If your list splits across both cards, run both. At $1.95 a task the experiment costs less than one published hour of a US virtual assistant.
FAQ
It depends on the unit. A dedicated virtual assistant service publishes an hourly rate: Time etc lists $390 a month for 10 hours, which is $39 an hour, stepping down to $36 an hour on its 60-hour plan, and BELAY's FAQ puts US virtual assistants at $30 to $75 an hour, or about $1,200 to $3,000 a month part-time. A task service like Fancy Hands publishes $35 a month for 3 requests of up to 20 minutes each. Lydoh Personal is $39 a month flat for up to 20 phone tasks. Figures fetched from each provider's own pricing page in September 2026.
Not quite. A personal assistant, in the older sense, is a person near your life who handles errands, household logistics, and calls. A virtual assistant service is usually remote knowledge work: inbox, calendar, research, documents, data entry, often billed in blocks of hours. The overlap is real, but the unit of sale is different, and the unit is what you end up paying for.
Lydoh does phone calls in both directions. It screens the numbers you do not recognize, takes a message, and texts it to you, and it makes outbound calls to book, reschedule, confirm, ask a question, or get a quote under a cap. That is the whole scope in this release. No email, no calendar sync, no research, no payments. Those belong to a person or to a virtual assistant service, and this page says so on purpose.
Yes, and it does not wait to be asked. Every outbound call opens with Lydoh naming itself and naming the person it is calling for, in that order, before it asks for anything. If the other end asks whether it is a person, it says it is a digital assistant and carries on helping. Every call is recorded and transcribed, so you can hear how your name was used.
It is not always better. An hourly rate is the fair way to buy open-ended work, because open-ended work really does take unpredictable time. A flat price is the fair way to buy a bounded outcome, because the clock stops mattering. If most of your list is bounded, hourly billing makes you ration the small stuff to avoid burning an hour on a two-minute call. That rationing is the real cost of the hourly model, and it does not show up on the invoice.
That is the honest answer for most people. Keep a virtual assistant service for inbox, research, and documents, and let the phone calls go somewhere that charges by the task. Lydoh is $39 a month with a 14-day free trial, which is less than one published hour of a US virtual assistant, so running both is a cheap experiment.
A hired one costs $23.23 an hour at the US median, which is $48,310 a year, and the executive tier of the same occupation is $76,590 a year, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics as of May 2025. Those are wages paid to the worker, before payroll taxes, benefits, or an agency margin, so treat them as the floor under any human option. Buying hours instead: Time etc publishes $390 a month for 10 hours, which is $39 an hour, and BELAY's own FAQ puts US virtual assistants at $30 to $75 an hour, roughly $1,200 to $3,000 a month for part-time support. Lydoh Personal is $39 a month flat for up to 20 phone tasks, which buys a much narrower job than any of those.
US virtual assistant services charge $30 to $75 an hour, roughly $1,200 to $3,000 a month for part-time support, according to BELAY's own FAQ. Time etc publishes $390 a month for 10 hours, which is $39 an hour, stepping down to $38, $37, and $36 an hour on its 20, 40, and 60 hour plans. A task service prices differently: Fancy Hands publishes $35 a month for 3 requests, with a standard request capped at 20 minutes of work. Every figure here came from the provider's own pricing page in September 2026, and they change them, so check before quoting any of it back.
A service assistant is a person or a piece of software that does errands and admin on someone else's behalf: booking, confirming, chasing, taking messages, keeping a list moving. The phrase stretches across a front desk at a business, a remote virtual assistant service, and software that handles one narrow slice of the work. Lydoh is the last kind, and the slice is phone calls: it screens the numbers you do not recognize and places the outbound calls to book, reschedule, confirm, ask a question, or get a quote under a cap. It does not touch email, calendars, research, or payments.
There is no single best one, so judge them by the unit they sell rather than by a ranking. An hourly service bills you for time, which is the fair way to buy open-ended work: research, inbox triage, documents, travel planning with real tradeoffs. A task or per-request service bills you for an outcome, which is the fair way to buy a bounded errand: a booking, a reschedule, a quote under a cap. Run your own list down the decision table above, and if most of it is open-ended an hourly service is the better buy, while if most of it is single phone calls with one known outcome, buying by the task costs less.
Sources. Wage and employment figures for administrative assistants: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Secretaries and Administrative Assistants (median $48,310 a year and $23.23 an hour as of May 2025; executive tier $76,590; 3,515,600 employed in 2025; 2 percent decline projected 2025 to 2035). Concierges: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Concierges (median $38,950 a year and $18.73 an hour in 2025; 50,200 employed; 3 percent growth projected 2025 to 2035). Virtual assistant hourly pricing: Time etc pricing page ($390 for 10 hours, $760 for 20, $1,480 for 40, $2,160 for 60, stated as $39, $38, $37, and $36 an hour) and BELAY, How much does it cost to hire a virtual assistant in the U.S. ($30 to $75 an hour; $1,200 to $3,000 a month part-time). Per-request pricing: Fancy Hands pricing page ($35 for 3 requests, $55 for 5, $125 for 15; standard requests up to 20 minutes of work). Lydoh price and task allowance: our pricing page. All figures fetched September 2026. Federal estimates are revised and providers change their prices; check the current pages before quoting any of this back at anyone.
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