Time Etc Virtual Assistant Review: Time Etc vs Belay and Alternatives

How much does a Time etc virtual assistant cost?

Time etc publishes four monthly plans. Ten hours is $390 a month, twenty hours $760, forty hours $1,480 and sixty hours $2,160, which the vendor itself breaks down as $39, $38, $37 and $36 an hour. There is no setup fee: you pay the first month to start. Larger plans exist and are arranged on a consultation call.

The effective rate barely moves across the range. Going from ten hours to sixty saves three dollars an hour, so the plan choice is really about how many hours of work you have, not about chasing a discount. That is different from most software, where the bigger plan is dramatically cheaper per unit.

On unused time, the pricing page lists hours rollover on the Twenty, Forty and Sixty hour cards, and the pricing FAQ says the hours you do not use roll into the next month. The rollover line does not appear on the Ten hours card, so if you start on the smallest plan and expect quiet months, ask on the call how rollover applies to you and what happens to banked hours if you cancel. The full plan by plan math, including what a year costs, is in our Time etc pricing breakdown.

Time etc vs BELAY: which US assistant service fits?

Both sell US-based assistants to small businesses and executives, and people shortlisting one usually find the other. The difference is mostly in how you buy.

Time etc prints its prices and sells small blocks. You can start at ten hours for $390, see exactly what each hour cost, and cancel with one email and no notice period. BELAY publishes no rate card at all: you fill in a form, talk to a Solutions Consultant and get a custom quote. BELAY's own FAQ puts US virtual assistants at $1,200 to $3,000 a month, which is the range it positions itself in.

BELAY's catalog is wider. Beyond executive and virtual assistants it sells bookkeeping, payroll, tax services and fractional controller and CFO work. Time etc sticks to general assistant work: admin, scheduling, inbox management, research and the everyday tasks that pile up around them. If you need a finance professional, BELAY is the closer fit. If you need a capable assistant for a predictable number of hours and want the price in writing before you talk to anyone, Time etc is.

Where a Time etc assistant beats any software, including ours

Most comparison pages written by software companies skip this part, so here it is plainly. A good human assistant does things no AI tool does, and if most of your delegated work looks like this, buy the hours.

A person makes calls. They sit on hold with the airline, chase the supplier who ignores email, and ring the venue to confirm the room. They exercise judgment on requests nobody has written a rule for, they handle personal errands alongside business work, and they work out a task that has never been done before. Time etc's assistants also sign NDAs and can be given a branded email address at your company, so clients deal with what looks like a member of your staff.

Time etc also gives you something software cannot: holiday and sickness cover built into the service. If your assistant is out, the work continues. That is the real case for an agency over hiring a freelancer directly.

Where the hours go when the work is repetitive

Now look at what a month of assistant time is actually spent on. In a lot of small offices it is: answering routine email in a house style, moving meetings and resending invites, saving attachments into the right folders, copying figures from one system into another, and nudging people who have not replied. Every one of those tasks follows the same pattern each time it happens.

Billed by the second at $36 to $39 an hour, that repetitive work is where most of the plan goes. Twenty hours for $760 is about an hour a working day. If half of that hour is inbox triage and calendar shuffling, you are paying a US professional rate for work that does not need a professional.

OfficeAgent does that half. It drafts replies in your voice from your past mail, books and reschedules meetings on your Google or Outlook calendar, files the documents that arrive by email, keeps spreadsheets current and writes the follow-up when a thread goes quiet. Every outgoing action waits for your one-click approval. See how email is handled, how meetings get booked, how documents are filed and how follow-ups are chased.

Time etc pricing vs OfficeAgent pricing

The structural difference is hours against a flat rate. Time etc charges for the time a person spends. OfficeAgent charges a fixed monthly price per office, however many drafts it writes.

OfficeAgent is $149 a month for one person and $399 a month for an office of up to ten teammates, or $119 and $319 a month billed yearly ($1,428 and $3,828 charged once a year). Enterprise starts at $1,500 a month. Assistant includes one inbox and 300 agent actions a month, Office a shared office inbox and 2,000. An action is counted when you approve a finished piece of work, so drafts you reject cost nothing. Every plan has a 14-day money-back guarantee and cancels in one click. Details are on our pricing page.

For scale: the $399 Office plan costs about the same as ten and a half hours of Time etc time at the Twenty hours rate, and it runs around the clock for up to ten people. That is not a like-for-like swap, because it makes no calls and no judgment calls. It is the cheaper way to cover the repeatable part of the job.

The setup most small offices end up with

You do not have to pick one. A common pattern is the smallest human plan that covers the judgment work, with software underneath carrying the volume. The assistant stops spending the first hour of the day on inbox triage and spends it on the things only a person can do.

Priced out, that looks like Time etc's Ten or Twenty hours plan ($390 or $760) for calls, travel, research and one-off problems, plus OfficeAgent at $149 or $399 for drafting, scheduling, filing and follow-ups. For a team that was about to buy forty hours at $1,480, the combination is cheaper and more of the work gets done on the day it arrives.

Who should hire Time etc

Time etc is a strong fit if most of these are true.

• You want a named, dedicated US-based person, and you like seeing a published hourly price before you talk to sales.
• You have a steady, ongoing flow of work. Time etc says plainly that it is not suited to one-off tasks or projects.
• The work needs phone calls, judgment, personal errands or tasks that change every week.
• Several people on your team need to share one assistant, which Time etc allows on a single plan at no extra charge.
• You want holiday and sickness cover handled by the agency rather than by you.

Reasons to look at software instead

More hours on a Time etc plan will not solve any of these.

• Most of the delegated time goes on routine email, scheduling, filing and follow-ups that look the same every week.
• The work arrives in the evening or at weekends, outside the hours your assistant keeps.
• You would rather pay a fixed price than watch a per-second meter against a monthly hours block.
• You want every outgoing message to wait for your approval, which is a workflow choice rather than a staffing one.
• Ten people need help, not one, and you do not want the cost to follow head count.