Someone rings while you’re on a ladder, under a sink, or with a customer. They don’t leave a message. They ring the next name on the list. Nobody logs that, so it never shows up as a number — which is exactly why it goes on for years.
This page has no price on it. What it has is a way to work out what those calls are worth to you, using your numbers. If the answer is small, we’ll tell you to buy something off the shelf instead — there’s a section further down naming the ones we’d point you at.
Your numbers, not ours
Four inputs. Move them until they look like your week. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs in your browser.
After hours, on another line, mid-job. Count the voicemails you never returned too.
Not everyone. Some were price-shopping, some were selling you something.
Profit, not invoice total. What’s left after materials and the crew’s time. Using the invoice total here will flatter the answer and neither of us wants that.
Answering the phone doesn’t close the job — you still do. Leave this at 50% unless you’re working from records rather than a feel.
How we’d price it
A build should cost somewhere around a tenth to a fifth of what the problem costs you in the first year, and you should be able to see roughly ten dollars back for every one you put in. If the sum doesn’t work at your volume, we say so on the call rather than finding out together in month four.
Because we don’t know your call volume, your systems or your booking rules yet, and a number invented before that conversation is a guess wearing a suit. You get a fixed figure in writing after one call — not an hourly rate, and not a range that moves later.
Scope
Same agent underneath. What changes is how much of your business it can reach into — and each step up has to be worth more to you, not just be a longer feature list.
Before you spend anything
Under about ten missed calls a week, a custom build is the wrong purchase and we’d rather say it here than on an invoice.
Rosie is around US$49 a month for 250 minutes. Goodcall is about US$59. My AI Front Desk is about US$65. A general AI answering service with 24/7 cover, booking and CRM integration typically runs US$99–299 a month. Any of those will answer a phone.
Where they stop is your systems: your booking rules, your CRM, your scripts, your data. That gap is what a build is for. If you don’t feel that gap, you don’t need us yet — and we’d rather you came back in a year than regretted it in a month.
Two things we say out loud
A voice agent bills by the minute it spends talking — roughly 16¢ a minute at current list rates. At 300 calls a month that is $100–150.
That sits on your telephony account and your card, not ours, so you can see every minute and we can never quietly mark it up. Our fee covers designing it, building it, testing it and supporting it. You get an estimate with the call volume it assumes written next to it, before you sign.
Unlike most software, this gets more expensive the better it does — more answered calls means more minutes. That is a real thing to know before you buy, and it is why the minutes sit on your account where they stay visible.
It also means the first month is the cheapest month, and the arithmetic in the calculator above needs to survive a busy one.
You can call one of ours and talk to it. That conversation tells you more than this page does — ask for the number.
Email David