Your bill shouldn't spike because your phone rang.
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.
One number, the whole front desk
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 and 500 texts per tech per month included, then 35¢ per answered call and 2¢ per text. An answered call is a real conversation, not a wrong number or a robocall. A text over 160 characters counts as each part. Never a per-minute meter.
Already have someone booking your jobs? Receptionist is $349 a month, flat. It answers when you choose, takes the details, and holds a time your office approves with one tap. It never books on its own. 300 answered calls included, same setup.
Priced against the alternatives
Billed by the call or the minute
Smith.ai's own pricing page, October 2026: $810 a month for 90 calls, then $10.50 a call. Ruby's own pricing page, October 2026: $720 a month for 200 minutes. Either way, you pay for every call from the very first one.
About $3,170 / mo in pay
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.
$350 / tech / mo
Nights and weekends included. Intake, booking, dispatch, tech app and reviews too. A 5-tech shop pays $1,550 a month.
No modules, no add-on menu
- 24/7, after hours, or overflow. Your choice
- Real HVAC intake with built-in safety handling
- Answers from your playbook; declines what you don’t do
- Sells your maintenance plan and recognizes members
- Books entire calls in Spanish
- Dispatch lanes, calendar, live map with drive times
- Explainable, credential-aware assignment
- Holds & approvals on your rules
- Tech mobile app with routes, photos and live status
- Completion requirements you set
- Transcribed, searchable calls on the customer record
- Customer import, website-form capture
- Google review sync, reply drafts, and post-job review asks
What owners ask before they sign
What happens if I go over fair use?
You pay 35¢ for each answered call and 2¢ for each text over the limit, on your next bill. We email you at 80% and again if you go over, and Settings shows your count any time.
Is there a contract?
Month to month. Your phone number stays yours, and leaving is just turning off the forward.
What does onboarding cost?
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.
How long until my line is 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.
We set it up with you, on one call.
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.