An answering service bills by the call or the minute, so the bill climbs in July, right when the phone is busiest. SERVALO is one price per technician, every month. A busy week costs you the same as a slow one.
Bigger shops pay less per tech: $350 a tech for the first 3, $250 for techs 4–8, $200 each after that.
Plus a one-time $499 setup, done with you. Unlimited office users: dispatchers and CSRs are free. You pay for techs on the board.
Fair use: 125 answered calls per tech per month included, then 35¢ per answered call. An “answered call” is a real conversation, not a wrong number or a robocall. Never a per-minute meter.
Smith.ai lists $810 a month for 90 calls, then $10.50 a call. Ruby lists $720 a month for 200 minutes. Both from their own pricing pages, October 2026. Either way, the bill goes up in the weeks your phone rings most.
That's the US median for a receptionist ($18.27 an hour, BLS, May 2025), before payroll taxes and benefits. And one full-time hire covers 40 of the week's 168 hours. Nobody's on the second line when both ring at once.
Nights and weekends included. Intake, booking, dispatch, tech app and reviews too. A 5-tech shop pays $1,550 a month.
You pay 35¢ for each answered call over the limit. We tell you before it happens, so the bill never surprises you.
Month to month. Your phone number stays yours, and leaving is just turning off the forward.
A one-time $499. We load your shop in, test it, and run practice calls with you, including a gas-smell drill, before your line goes live.
Your line goes live in 1 to 2 days. We load your shop in, test it, and run practice calls first. Most of it is on us: you'll spend about 30 minutes on a call with us.
Your line goes live in 1 to 2 days. We load your shop in, test it, and run practice calls first. Most of it is on us: you'll spend about 30 minutes on a call with us. You get the people who build it on the phone, and your feedback shapes what we build next.