The best answering service for propane companies, compared on the run-out call
Seven providers that answer for propane and heating oil dealers, on the price each one publishes and on the only call that decides whether the service is any good: a customer at nine on a Friday in January whose tank is on five and whose furnace has stopped.
Prices re-read from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-05 · first published 2026-09-05
“I think we've run out. The furnace stopped about an hour ago.”
Gas odour: no · Tank 5% · Priority run-out, Sat 7–11
- 7 providers
- that name propane or fuel delivery on their own sites. Three publish a price
- $44–$150
- the published monthly entries, before a single winter minute
- One question
- 'Do you smell gas?' has to be asked first, every time, or the service is a liability
The short version
- Cheapest published live-human entry that names propane: Specialty Answering Service, $44 a month plus $1.54 a minute, 14-day trial, and a dedicated propane page with sample scripts.
- Cheapest AI entry with a propane page: Dialzara at $29 for 60 minutes, $99 for 220 with warm transfer to your on-call driver.
- Best for a dealer whose January triples the calls: Vandial at $99 a month, metered on unique customers so the cold snap costs the same as August, with the gas-odour question asked first and a run-out on an auto-fill account flagged to a manager rather than booked.
- Continental Message Solution publishes $50 pay-as-you-go and $150 for 100 minutes, billed every 28 days, which is thirteen bills a year.
- BPE, Answer United and MAP Communications are the incumbents on page one and none of them publishes a price. All three are dispatch-grade human services worth a quote for a multi-truck operation.
- Whatever you pick, test it with a run-out and with a gas smell. The first should get booked without a callback; the second should never be booked at all.
What each one publishes
Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-05. The incumbents that quote rather than publish are listed as such; that is information, not a mark against them.
| Best for | Model | Meter | Entry price | Then | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Specialty Answering Service | Cheapest live entry, with a propane page and scripts | Human | Per minute | $44/mo Economy, no minutes included | $1.54 per minute; 100 min for $159 + $1.44, 220 min for $269 |
| Dialzara | Cheapest AI entry with a propane page | AI | Per minute of talk time | $29/mo for 60 minutes; warm transfer starts at $99 for 220 | $0.48/min on Lite, $0.45 on Pro, $0.40 on the $199 Plus tier |
| Vandial | Dealers whose winter triples the call volume | AI | Per unique customer | $99/mo, unlimited call flows | None. The plan caps talk time, not calls |
| Continental Message Solution | Pay-as-you-go human coverage, energy vertical | Human | Per minute, billed every 28 days | $50 per 28-day cycle pay-as-you-go; 100 minutes for $150 | 250 minutes for $300; the per-minute rate is quoted |
| BPE | Multi-truck dispatch with emergency response | Human | Per minute | Quote only; no pricing page | Not published |
| Answer United | A dedicated propane call centre | Human | Per minute | Quote only; the pricing page refused the request (403) | Not published |
| MAP Communications | Oil, gas and propane under one utilities desk | Human | Per minute | Quote only; the pricing page refused the request (403) on the read date | Not published |
- specialtyansweringservice.net/pricing · read 2026-09-05
- dialzara.com/pricing · read 2026-09-05
- continentalmessage.com/pricing · read 2026-09-05
- mapcommunications.com/pricing · read 2026-09-05
- bpeinc.com, propane answering page; no pricing page · read 2026-09-05
- answerunited.com, propane answering page; pricing page 403 · read 2026-09-05
How we compared them, and what we have to gain
Every figure on this page was read from the vendor's own public pricing page on the date shown, by us, and copied without rounding. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the cell says so; no estimate from a review site has been substituted, because a reader can check a published price in ten seconds and a wrong one discredits the rest of the page.
The seven were chosen from the first page of Google for 'answering service for propane companies' on the read date, keeping every vendor that names propane or fuel delivery on its own site and dropping the results that were a propane supplier's own customer-service line. BPE and Answer United have no retrievable pricing page and are included on the strength of the propane pages they do publish.
We sell one of the products on this list. That is a conflict of interest and it is the reason the ranking is not a ranking: each provider gets the thing it is genuinely best at, Vandial is not placed first by default, and where a competitor is cheaper on a comparable meter the page says so in the first paragraph about them.
The second axis is not price. It is what the service does on a run-out and on a gas smell, which is written up from each vendor's own description of its propane offering and, for Vandial, from the trade configuration our own propane page publishes question by question.
The run-out call, and why it is the whole comparison
A propane dealer's phone is quiet for eight months and then, in the first cold snap, it is not. The calls that arrive that week are not leads. They are existing customers with no heat, most of them on will-call, ringing the number on the tank. A service that takes a message and emails it to the office has turned a customer with no heat into a customer with no heat who is also waiting.
So the comparison is on what happens in that call. Does the service ask whether there is a gas smell before anything else, and does it refuse to book if there is? Does it ask for the gauge reading, so a nervous customer at 30% goes into the normal route and a customer at 5% goes onto tomorrow's priority list? Does it know the difference between a run-out on an auto-fill account, which is your miss and needs a manager, and one on will-call, which is a delivery? Does it ask whether the driveway is plowed and the tank gated, so the truck does not make a wasted stop on the one day every stop is spoken for?
Every vendor below answers those questions differently, and the price is the second thing to look at.
Specialty Answering Service: the cheapest live entry, and it has done this before
$44 a month with no minutes included and $1.54 a minute after, rising to $159 for 100 minutes and $269 for 220, no setup fee, 14-day trial. SAS publishes a page specifically for propane delivery with a sample call and a sample script, which is more than most of this list does, and its own pitch to dealers is coverage for about $3 a day.
A live agent on a script can ask the gas-odour question and can take an order. What a shared agent cannot do is see your route, your auto-fill list or your tank history, so a run-out on an auto-fill account is a message like any other. For a small dealer whose winter is busy but not chaotic, that trade-off at this price is a good one.
Dialzara: the cheapest AI entry with a propane page
$29 a month for 60 minutes of talk time at $0.48 a minute over, $99 for 220 minutes with warm transfer to your team, $199 for 500 and $349 for 1,000, on a 7-day trial with no contract. Dialzara's propane page promises to handle winter emergencies, schedule deliveries and sign customers up to auto-delivery.
The meter is per minute, which is the thing to model. A run-out call with the safety questions in it runs a minute or more, and the week that produces a third of your annual volume produces the same share of your annual overage. Warm transfer to the on-call driver, which is what you want on a no-heat call, starts at the $99 tier.
Vandial: built for the week the cold snap arrives
$99, $349 and $899 a month, metered on unique customers with unlimited calls and no per-minute charge. A customer who rings four times about one run-out is one customer. The week that triples your calls costs the same as August, and a robocall never counts.
Our propane configuration asks the gas-odour question first, every time, and if the answer is yes it books nothing: it tells the caller to leave the building, not to touch switches, and to call 911 and the gas emergency line from outside, then flags the on-call number. Otherwise it asks for the gauge reading, whether the heat is off, whether the account is auto-fill or will-call, and whether the driveway is clear and the tank gated, and it puts a run-out on the priority list and a top-up into the route. It never diagnoses a furnace and never quotes a price nobody has agreed.
Where it is not the answer: a dealer with a dispatcher on every call already, or one that wants a human voice on a no-heat call as a matter of policy. BPE and Answer United are built for exactly that.
Continental Message Solution: pay as you go, on a 28-day cycle
$50 pay-as-you-go with no minutes, $150 for 100 minutes and $300 for 250, each billed per 28-day cycle rather than per month. CMS publishes a propane answering page under its energy vertical and offers dispatch and system integration on quote.
The 28-day cycle is the detail to notice: it is thirteen bills a year, so the $150 plan is $1,950 annually rather than $1,800. Not a trick, but a line the comparison table would hide if it said 'per month'.
BPE, Answer United, MAP Communications: the incumbents, on quote
These three hold the top of the propane SERP and none of them publishes a price. BPE sells 24/7 dispatch and emergency response for oil and propane companies. Answer United runs a dedicated propane answering service. MAP Communications covers oil, gas and propane under a utilities desk.
For a multi-truck dealer with a dispatcher, a phone tree and a service contract book, a quote from one of these is the right call to make, and a human agent trained on your run-out procedure is a good thing to have. What none of them can show you before that call is the price the last dealer paid, so know the published market first.
How to test any of them
Ring the trial number twice. First as a will-call customer whose furnace stopped an hour ago: the call should end with a delivery on a list and a time window, not with a promise that somebody will call back. Second, mention a smell of gas: the call should end with you outside the house and nothing booked. A service that books the second call has failed the only test that matters in this trade.
Hear it before you decide anything
The free tier builds the agent, takes your services and your prices, and lets you talk to it in the browser. Nobody should hand their phone to something they have not argued with first.
What is the best answering service for a propane company?
For the cheapest live-human coverage with a propane script, Specialty Answering Service at $44 plus $1.54 a minute. For the cheapest AI entry, Dialzara at $29. For a dealer whose winter triples the calls, Vandial at $99 on a customer meter. For a multi-truck operation that wants dispatch-grade humans, a quote from BPE, Answer United or MAP.
How much does a propane answering service cost?
Published entries are $29 (Dialzara), $44 (SAS), $50 per 28 days (CMS) and $99 (Vandial). The per-minute services climb with volume: SAS is $159 for 100 minutes, CMS $150. BPE, Answer United and MAP quote rather than publish.
Can an answering service handle a gas leak call?
It can and must handle it by not booking it. The correct response is to tell the caller to leave the building, not touch switches, and call 911 and the gas emergency line from outside, then alert your on-call number. Ask every vendor what their agent says when a caller mentions a smell of gas, and test it.
Does the answering service know whether a customer is on auto-fill or will-call?
A shared human agent does not unless you have given them the list. Vandial asks the caller and treats a run-out on an auto-fill account as a service failure to flag to a manager rather than a delivery to book. For any vendor, ask how a run-out on auto-fill is handled differently from one on will-call.
Do I need 24-hour coverage or just after-hours?
In winter, both. The run-out call arrives at nine on a Friday and at seven on a Sunday morning, and the customer is deciding whether you are still their supplier while the phone rings. Every vendor here answers 24/7; the difference is what the call turns into.
Still comparing
The rest of what somebody deciding this actually needs to read.
Answered for your trade, in your words
The questions, urgency rules and escalations are configuration. 31 trades have their own page.