You are the estimator, the scheduler and the receptionist
A small business does not miss calls because nobody cares about the phone. It misses them because the person who would answer is under a sink, on a roof, or with a customer, and the call that goes unanswered is worth more than the hour that was interrupted.
From $99 a month · Robocalls are never billed
Incoming callMarion Whitcombe“I tried you on Tuesday as well. Nobody picked up then either.”
Answered while the owner was under a sink · Booked
- Flat
- One monthly price. Not per call, not per minute, not per message taken
- Ten minutes
- To set up: your hours, your services, your prices, your number
- $0
- Robocalls and wrong numbers are zero-rated and never create a customer record
Not a message. A booking
Every one of these is something the product does on a real call, not a capability statement. Where it refuses to act, that refusal is the design.
It is priced the way a small business can actually budget
Per-call and per-minute billing is built for a call centre's margin, not your cash flow: the month you are busiest is the month the bill is largest, and the quiet month still carries a minimum. Vandial is a flat monthly plan with unlimited call flows. The plans differ only in how many unique customers you answer for.
It books, which is the part a message-taker cannot do
Every service on this search result takes a name and a number and sends it to you. That is a lead you still have to chase, from a ladder, between jobs. The agent reads your working hours and remaining capacity and writes the appointment into the same Google, Outlook, Apple or CalDAV calendar you already keep.
It knows your prices, because you told it
Your service call fee, your hourly rate, your minimum, your travel radius. It states them exactly as configured and refuses to guess at anything else. It will not price a repair nobody has looked at. A small business lives or dies on quoting discipline and this does not undermine it.
Nothing about your number changes
You keep the number on the van, the website and the Google listing. Calls route to the agent and the caller sees nothing different. There is no new number to publish and nothing to reprint.
You are still the first person it tries
The transfer ladder rings you before it handles anything alone, and each leg has to be accepted by pressing 1 so your own voicemail cannot swallow the call. You take the calls you want to take. It takes the ones that were going to voicemail.
Setup is an afternoon, not an implementation
There is no account manager, no onboarding call and no scripting workshop. You fill in your hours, your services and your prices, connect a calendar, and point the number. The trades this is built for do not have somebody free to run a project.
What people say before they say yes
In the words they are usually put in. Where the objection is right, it says so.
“I'm too small for this. It's just me.”
One person is the case with the least slack in it. There is nobody else to pick up, and every call arrives while you are doing the work you were hired for. The plans start at the size where a single recovered job in a year covers the whole year, which is why the entry rung exists at all.
“My customers ring me because they want me.”
They ring you because they want the problem fixed, and today a good share of them are getting a voicemail beep. The agent is not standing between you and your customers; it is standing between your customers and the answerphone. When you pick up, none of this happens.
“A cheap answering service is £X a month and this is more.”
It is, and per-message services are genuinely cheap, until you count what a message costs. A message is a callback you owe someone, made hours later, by the most expensive person in the business, to a customer who has already rung two other numbers. The comparison is not the invoice; it is the invoice plus the jobs.
What it will never do
You are handing your phone to something that talks to your customers when you cannot. These are the lines it does not cross, and the words it uses instead.
It never invents a price
It states the call-out fee and the rates you configured, and nothing else. Where it does not know, it says so and brings it to you rather than guessing — a number said on the phone is a number you are held to at the door.
What it actually says
“I'm not going to guess at the repair before someone's seen it — you'd only be annoyed if I got it wrong.”
It never promises an hour it cannot keep
Work in the field is booked in windows, because a specific time is a promise the traffic breaks. It offers the window that actually has capacity left, and it will not invent one to end the call politely.
What it actually says
“I can do Tuesday morning, between eight and twelve — I won't give you an exact hour and have you waiting in all day.”
It never sends anyone to voicemail
If the transfer ladder runs out and nobody accepts, it takes the details, commits to a specific callback window and flags it. A beep is the one outcome worse than not answering at all.
What it actually says
“I can't reach anyone this minute, so let me take the details and someone will call you back before nine tomorrow.”
The job lands where you already work
Google, Outlook, Apple, Exchange, CalDAV — whichever calendar you already keep. Then your payments, your CRM, and whatever you automate with.
…and a lot more besides
- Warm transfersWarm transfersAnnounced — who is calling and why, before you take the line.
- Spam never billedSpam never billedRobocalls are spotted, zero-rated, and never become a customer.
- A number per sourceA number per sourceVan, yard sign, Google listing — see which line brings the work.
- Team & on-callTeam & on-callTries you, then a second number, then whoever is on call.
- Run it by textRun it by textReply to a text to move a job, block a morning, clear a day.
- Clear a day, everyone toldClear a day, everyone toldCall off a wet Tuesday; every customer is told and re-offered.
- Never invents an answerNever invents an answerNo price or slot it was not given. It takes a message instead.
- Any trade, no codeAny trade, no codeGoal, questions and guardrails are settings, not a rebuild.
How small is too small?
There is no floor. The entry plan is sized for a shop doing something like nine to sixty calls a month: the sole operator with no employees, which is roughly half of the licensed trade businesses in the states we have measured.
Do I need a phone system?
No. You need a number you can forward, which every mobile and every business line already does. Nothing here runs on your hardware, so a dead phone or a broken broadband connection does not stop calls being answered.
What happens on the day I get forty calls?
The same as the day you get four, at the same price. Unlimited call flows on every paid plan and no per-minute billing, which matters most in the trades where one storm produces a month of volume in an afternoon.
Can it take messages instead of booking?
It can, and for some call types that is the right behaviour. But taking a message is the fallback here rather than the product, which is the opposite of every human answering service on this page.
Will callers know it isn't a person?
Some will, and it never claims to be a person. What matters more is what it is replacing: for the calls it handles, the honest comparison is not you. It is voicemail.
What does it cost?
Plans start at $99 a month, with unlimited call flows and a monthly talk-time allowance; they differ in how many unique customers you cover. There is also a free tier for building and testing the agent in the browser before you point a number at it.
Who it is for
Sized by the business rather than the trade — because a two-van shop and a twelve-crew company buy this for different reasons.
Answered for your trade, in your words
The questions, urgency rules and escalations are configuration. 31 trades have their own page.