Ask three answering services what they charge and you will get three numbers that cannot be compared. One quotes a rate per minute. One quotes a rate per call. One quotes a flat monthly fee with a call allowance you have never had to think about before. None of them is lying to you. They are just measuring different things, and the thing they measure decides what you actually pay.
Here is how the common models work, and what to ask before you sign anything.
The unit is the whole game
A per-minute service charges for talk time. That sounds fair until you notice how differently the trades talk on the phone.
A barbershop call is short. "You got anybody open at four?" Forty seconds, done. A plumbing call is not short. The caller has water coming up through the slab in the basement, they are describing the sound it makes, they are trying to find the shutoff, and they want to know if you can be there tonight. Same service, same rate card, and the plumber's bill is several times the barber's.
Garage door, auto repair, and pool service sit in between and swing hard by season. A no-start diagnosis call has a lot of back and forth about what the car did and when. A pool opening call in May involves a green pool, a cover, and a question about the filter. An ice storm turns garage door calls into a line out the door for a week.
So with per-minute pricing, ask about the mechanics, not just the rate:
- What is the billing increment? Some services bill to the second, some round every call up to the next full minute. On short calls, rounding up is most of the bill.
- Is there a minimum charge per call? A thirty second wrong number can be billed as a full minute or more.
- Does the clock include the greeting, hold time, and the transfer? If the caller sits on hold while someone tries you on your cell, find out who pays for that silence.
- Are nights, weekends, and holidays a different rate? That matters most for the trades that get paid for nights and weekends.
Per call sounds simple until you define a call
Per-call pricing is easier to picture. You pay a set amount each time the phone is answered on your behalf. The question to ask is what counts.
Robocalls count on some plans (more on that in what happens to spam calls). Wrong numbers count. A customer who calls back twice because she forgot to mention the gate code counts as three calls on some plans and one on others. If you run ads, expect a share of dial-by-mistake traffic and price accordingly.
Ask directly: do you bill wrong numbers, telemarketers, and repeat calls from the same number inside a short window? Get the answer in writing in the quote, not on the phone.
Flat monthly, and the month that breaks it
Flat monthly is the easiest to budget, which is exactly why you should read what the flat fee includes. Most flat plans include a bucket of calls or minutes and charge an overage rate above it. The overage rate is the real price, because the trades do not spread their calls evenly across twelve months.
Painters and cleaners get a spring rush. Pool service gets slammed at opening and again at closing. Electricians get a wave every time a storm knocks the power out and half the neighborhood has a tripped breaker they cannot reset. Any metered plan is cheap in your slow month and expensive in the month that actually pays your year.
Before you sign, take your busiest month from last year and do the math at the overage rate. That number, not the base fee, is what you are buying.
Setup fees and contracts
A setup fee usually pays for programming: your greeting, your call flow, your service area, what you do and do not take. Ask what it buys and ask what a change costs later. If you drop a service line in the fall or add a second truck, you do not want a fee attached to every edit.
On the contract, four things matter. The length of the term. Whether it renews on its own. How much notice you have to give to stop. And whose phone number it is.
That last one is worth slowing down on. If the service forwards your existing number, you keep the number that is printed on your trucks, your yard signs, your invoices, and every fridge in town. If the service hands you a new number and you start advertising it, leaving gets expensive in a way that has nothing to do with the monthly fee. Terms vary by company, so read yours and ask your own attorney if anything in it is unclear to you.
Put every quote on one page
Same six questions, every vendor, written down:
- What is the unit, and what is the rounding increment?
- What is included in the base price, and what is the overage rate?
- What counts as billable, specifically including wrong numbers and repeat callers?
- Is there a setup fee, and what does a change cost after setup?
- What is the term, does it auto renew, and how much notice ends it?
- Whose number is it when this is over?
When all six answers sit next to each other, the cheapest headline rate usually is not the cheapest service.
What you are actually paying for
There are three levels of value here and they are priced like they are the same thing.
The cheapest is a message. Somebody took a name and a number and you call back later. Better than a voicemail, barely (more on that in voicemail, answering service, or AI receptionist).
The middle is an answered question. The caller learns that you cover Wentzville but not Jefferson County, that you do not service above ground pools, that the shop is closed Sunday. That call does not become a job, but it does not waste your evening either.
The top is a job on the calendar with the address, the problem, and the time slot, so you are driving to work instead of returning calls at nine at night. Judge every quote against that, because a service that only ever takes messages is not cheap at any price.
Your next step
Pull your call log from your carrier for last month. Count the inbound calls that went unanswered, and split them into business hours and after hours. Then add up your last twenty invoices and divide by twenty to get your real average ticket, and be honest about how many answered calls turn into work.
Multiply those three numbers together. Now you know what your missed calls are worth, and every quote in front of you has something to be measured against.