What you get for 29 dollars a month

Jobber sells an AI receptionist add-on for twenty nine dollars a month, and that price includes thirty conversations. Past thirty, its help page says you pay seventy nine cents for each additional one. On the Plus plan it comes included with no cap. I am not picking on Jobber here. Their pricing is published in plain language, which is more than most of this market does. Thirty conversations a month works out to roughly one a day. So before you compare features or listen to a single demo, do that division. The number that decides whether a cheap plan fits your shop is not the price.

01Twenty nine dollars buys an allowance, not a service

Read any entry plan in this market and you find the same shape. A small monthly, a bundle of calls or conversations included, and a per unit charge above it. The monthly is not really the price. It is the price of the first thirty.

That allowance is the most useful thing on the page, because it tells you who the plan was built for. A vendor who sizes their starter tier at thirty conversations has decided the typical buyer for it misses about one call a day. If that is you, the plan fits. If you miss four a day, you are not the customer that plan was priced for, and you will find that out on your bill instead of on the website.

So the honest first step is not shopping. It is counting. Pull last week’s call log from your carrier or your phone system and count the calls that rang out, went to voicemail, or got picked up by somebody who took a name and nothing else. I wrote out how to do that properly in how to count the calls your business is missing, and the number is almost always higher than owners guess before they look.

Then compare. Six missed calls a week is about twenty six a month, which sits inside thirty with a little room. Ten a week is about forty three, which is thirteen over. At seventy nine cents each that is ten dollars and change. Notice what that means. Going over the allowance on a plan like this is not a trap. It is just a slightly bigger small number.

02Where cheap is genuinely the right answer

I sell an answering system, so read this section knowing I have an interest, and then check it against your own numbers anyway.

If you already pay for field service software that includes this, turn theirs on before you buy anything from anybody, including me. Jobber includes Receptionist on the Plus plan at no extra charge. Paying a second vendor to answer the same calls your existing software already answers is the most common way owners waste money in this category. Go look at what your plan already covers. Do it today. It takes ten minutes and it might end your shopping entirely.

Cheap also works when the calls themselves are simple. If most of what you miss is a customer asking whether you cover their town, what your hours are, or whether you can come out Thursday, a basic setup handles that fine. The gap between a thirty dollar tier and a three hundred dollar one does not show up on the easy calls. It shows up on the strange ones.

And there is a third case nobody mentions. If you have never measured any of this, a cheap plan is a decent measuring instrument. Run it for a month on the calls you currently miss and you get a log of what those callers actually wanted, which is information you cannot buy and cannot guess. Some owners find the missed calls were mostly suppliers and wrong numbers. Better to learn that for twenty nine dollars than to assume it either way.

03The month your allowance stops matching your phone

Your call volume is not flat, and the allowance is.

Every trade has a week that breaks the pattern. The first real heat wave, the first hard freeze, the morning after a hailstorm. I went through what that does to an HVAC phone in what your phone does during the first heat wave, and the short version is that your worst answer rate and your highest value calls land in the same week. That is also the week you blow through thirty conversations by the middle of the month.

Per conversation pricing handles that fairly, to be clear. You pay more in a busy month and less in a quiet one, same as any usage based bill. The question worth asking a vendor is narrower and it is one people forget: what happens at thirty one? Does it keep answering and add it to my bill, or does it stop? Those are very different products at the same advertised price, and the answer is usually buried in the agreement rather than printed on the pricing page. Ask in writing.

The second question is how a conversation gets counted. Jobber’s help center says a call only counts when the AI actually engages, that spam does not count, and that a text thread stays open as one conversation for up to twenty four hours. That is a reasonable definition. Read the one your own vendor uses, because a conversation is a unit somebody invented, and whoever wrote the definition decided your bill.

04The parts that cost the same at every price

Here is what no plan includes at any tier, and where most of the real work sits.

Somebody has to decide what the thing says. Not the voice or the script polish, the business rules. Which towns you cover. What you will not touch. Which questions it should ask before it takes a message. What counts as an emergency in your trade, and which human number an emergency goes to at eleven at night. That is an hour or two of your attention and nobody can do it for you, because it is your shop.

Then there is month one. Listen to the first fifty calls. Not to catch the software making an obvious mistake, but to catch the thing you forgot to tell it, which is always something specific to you. The shop that services mobile homes and the shop that refuses them both sound normal until a caller asks.

That work is identical whether you paid twenty nine dollars or five hundred. Which cuts in favor of cheap plans more than vendors like to admit. If the setup effort is the same and your call volume is low, the expensive tier is buying you things you may not need yet.

05What actually separates the tiers

Price differences in this market are mostly about behavior at the edges, not about how good the voice sounds. The voice is largely a solved problem now and a cheap plan often uses the same underlying models as an expensive one.

What changes is what the system is allowed to do when it is unsure, and who fixes it when it gets something wrong.

Three things are worth checking at any price. First, what happens when it does not know the answer. A good answer is that it takes a message and texts you. A bad answer is that it improvises, which is how a caller ends up quoted a price by something that has never seen the job. Second, whether anything lands on your calendar without the caller confirming a time out loud. A missed call costs you a callback, while a job on the schedule nobody agreed to costs you a truck, a tech and half a Saturday. I made the full argument for that in why an AI should never book a job without confirming it first. Third, gas, medical and live electrical. The system should stop, tell the person to get out and call the gas company or 911, and hand off to a human. That is not a premium feature and any vendor charging extra for it has their priorities backwards.

If you want the full list of things to put to a vendor before you pay them, it is in what to ask an AI phone vendor. Ask the cheap ones the same questions you would ask the expensive ones. The price does not change what you are entitled to know.

06Deciding this in one afternoon

You do not need a comparison spreadsheet with fourteen columns. You need four facts and about an hour.

Count your missed calls from last week. Check whether the software you already pay for includes an answering feature, and turn it on if it does. Work out what one job is worth to you, because that is the number every other number gets compared against. Then decide what you want to happen at nine on a Saturday night, which is the situation that separates a system you will keep from one you will switch off in week three.

Put your missed call count next to the allowance. If you are comfortably under it and your calls are straightforward, buy the cheap thing and stop reading blog posts about it, including mine. If you are well over it, or your busy season doubles your volume, or the calls you miss are the ones where somebody is standing in water, price the tier that handles that instead and compare it against what you already spend. I went through that arithmetic against answering services and voicemail in what each one costs you in a year.

One last thing that removes most of the risk from this decision. You do not have to cancel anything or move your number to test any of it. Call routing is a setting inside your own carrier account, so a trial runs on the calls you are currently losing while everything else stays exactly as it is. If it turns out worse than what you had, you switch a setting back. I explained how that works in what happens to your phone number.

Frequently asked questions

Is a twenty nine dollar plan enough for a two truck shop?

Often, yes. A two truck shop that misses five or six calls a week fits inside a thirty conversation allowance with room to spare, and the calls being missed are usually simple ones. The place it stops being enough is not shop size, it is the kind of call. If you are regularly missing after hours emergencies rather than daytime scheduling questions, the thing that matters is how the system escalates, and that is worth paying for at any volume.

What happens when I go over the included conversations?

Depends on the vendor, and this is the question to get answered in writing. Jobber publishes seventy nine cents per conversation past thirty, so going over is just a slightly larger bill. Other plans stop answering once you hit the cap, which is a very different outcome in your busiest week. Same advertised price, opposite behavior. Ask before you sign, not after.

Does a cheap plan mean the AI sounds worse?

Usually not. The speech models underneath are widely available now and a low priced plan often uses the same ones. What you give up at the bottom of the market is the stuff around the call. How much you can tell it about your business, whether emergencies route to a human properly, whether you can hear the recordings, and who picks up the phone at the vendor when something is wrong on a Friday. Judge it on those, not on how natural the voice is in the demo.

I already pay for field service software. Should I just use theirs?

Try theirs first. If it is included in your plan, the marginal cost is zero and you get a month of real data about what your missed calls actually are. It also sits next to your schedule and your customer list already, which is genuinely convenient. Switch only if you find a specific thing it will not do, and be able to name that thing. “It felt basic” is not a reason to add a second bill.

How long before I know whether it is working?

About three weeks, if you listen. The first fifty calls tell you most of it. You are looking for calls it handled that you would have lost, and for the moment it says something you would not have said, because that second one is the setup gap and every shop has at least one. If nobody listens to the recordings, you will not know whether it is working at any price.

The bottom line

The cheap tier is real and for a lot of shops it is the correct answer, especially the ones already paying for software that includes it. What twenty nine dollars buys is an allowance sized for a business that misses about one call a day, plus whatever that vendor decided the system is allowed to do when it is unsure. Both of those are knowable before you spend anything. Neither of them is the price.

So count first. If your number fits the allowance and your calls are ordinary, spend the twenty nine dollars and get on with your week.

We book appointments for roofing companies: we find homeowners looking for roof repair or replacement, answer their replies and book them into your system. If that would help your team, see how it works at rushdial.com/roofing.