Answering service pricing, and who it’s not for.

A robot, and it says so. It’s an A.I. voice. If a caller asks whether they’re talking to a person, it tells them plainly that it’s an A.I. voice — it’s built never to deny it. Call (314) 784-8835 and hear it for yourself before you decide how you feel about that.

It can misunderstand a caller. Every one of these can, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling. So it’s built to hand off rather than guess: urgent, sensitive or upset callers transfer to your on-call number, and when it doesn’t know something it says the team will follow up instead of making something up. Every call is recorded and transcribed, and every two weeks we go through the ones that went badly and fix the script.

Yours. Your business name, your greeting, your hours, your service area, your rule about quoting over the phone. The demo line answers as “Ava” because it’s a demo. Your callers never hear our name.

Yes. It checks what is actually free and books into the calendar you already use, with the job attached — name, address, problem, urgency — read back to the caller first. If you would rather your office closed the time, it raises the callback instead; that is a choice you make at setup, not a limitation. The same goes for a confirmation text and for writing the call into whatever system you already run.

You do, or whoever is on call. Urgent calls transfer to the number you give us, right then, while the caller is still on the line — not as a message you read later. Our team is based in the United Kingdom and doesn’t staff a live transfer desk, so we don’t offer human transfer to us. The human at the end of an urgent call is yours.

Three plans: Never Miss a Job at $497 a month plus a $2,000 setup, Speed-to-Lead at $997 a month plus $3,000, and the done-for-you Growth System at $1,997 a month plus $5,000 and your own ad budget. Before any of that, hear your own receptionist free at heyfirstcall.com/start, then run it on your real line for 7 days for $19. That covers the trial's phone line and minutes and counts toward your first month. The first five businesses pay half in exchange for a case study.

The first version takes under a minute: give us your website at heyfirstcall.com/start and your receptionist answers in your browser with your business name, services and hours. The 7-day trial on your real line starts as soon as the $19 arrives. On a plan, we then tune it with you: what counts as urgent, where bookings go, what it should never say, and your number only points at it once you are happy with it.

No. You keep your number and forward it to us — every call, only after hours, or only when nobody picks up. Your choice, and you can switch it back whenever you like.

Not from us, and it is fairer to say so on this page than on a call. We are not the cheap option and we are not trying to be: what we build is scoped to your business, in voice or chat, around how your leads actually arrive and what has to happen in the first sixty seconds. That is not a thing with a shelf price. If what you need is a number to dial that takes a message at the lowest possible rate, there is a whole industry of per-minute services and one of them will beat us on cost. Worth knowing before you buy one: per-minute billing charges you most in exactly the month you most needed the phone answered, because a storm week triples the calls and triples the bill. What we do instead is let you hear your own receptionist free, then run it on your real line for 7 days for $19, so you find out what it is worth to you before you commit to a plan.

The three things that decide whether a quote is comparable: whether you are billed per minute, per call or a flat monthly fee; whether transfers, hold time and the wrap-up after a call are counted as billable minutes, which is where a cheap per-minute rate quietly doubles; and what happens when you go over the bundle. Ask any provider those three and the cheapest quote often stops being the cheapest. Our plans are a flat monthly fee, not per minute, and we tell you up front if your call volume is far outside the normal range.

Call them. Not a demo booking, not a sales call — ring the number a customer would ring, at the hour your customers actually ring, and listen to what happens. Ours is (314) 784-8835 and it answers now, including at three in the morning. What you are listening for is whether the second question is the right one, because the first question is always easy and any service can take a name.