Phone answering service for tradies: what each one costs.

You are on a roof, under a sink, or halfway through a switchboard. The phone buzzes in your pocket and you let it go. By the time your hands are clean and you ring back, the customer has worked down the search results and somebody else has picked up. That is the whole reason phone answering service for tradies gets typed into Google.

The awkward part is what comes back. One phrase, four products, priced four different ways. A person on your line taking messages. Software that speaks on your line. A remote assistant working to a longer brief. And a written assistant on your own website, answering people who never rang at all. Line them up on price alone and you are comparing four different jobs.

So work out which enquiries you are actually losing first. If the phone rings out while you are on the tools, you have a call problem. If people find you on a phone screen in the evening, read two pages and leave before ringing, that is a different problem. Answering the phone leaves it exactly where it was.

Each of these is something you could sign up for this week. Search electrician answering service or plumber answering service and the same four come back with the trade name swapped in. What separates them is who they reach, and how deep they can go into what you have already put on your site.

Two things follow from that. Phone cover and website cover reach different people. Whoever rings you and whoever searched are rarely the same person on the same evening. And only software working from your own site can answer in any depth. A brief handed to a call team is about a page. Your website is everything you have ever published.

Most of what a trade business gets asked has already been answered somewhere on its own website. Somebody comparing quotes from the sofa reads a services page, hits one thing it does not cover, and closes the tab. These are the five that keep coming back.

• "Do you even do this kind of job?" The first thing anybody asks, and the one that decides whether they keep reading. It comes back from your own services page — yes to switchboard upgrades, no to solar, or whatever you have actually put in writing.
• "Roughly what does a call-out fee run to?" Answered from your published rates where you publish them. Where the figure only exists after somebody has looked at the job, it says exactly that, takes the details, and tells the customer who will be in touch.
• "Do you come out to my suburb?" Pure logistics, asked constantly, and settled in one line from your own coverage list. A customer well outside your patch finds that out before either of you spends time on it.
• "How soon could somebody come?" It reads back whatever your site says about lead times and takes the job, the address and the urgency in the customer's own words. The day itself stays yours, because your week is in your head, not on your website.
• "Are you licensed and insured?" Repeated word for word from the page where you published it, and handed to you where the page stays silent. It quotes your own wording about your trade, and adds none of its own.

Almost none of that arrives during working hours. It turns up after you knock off, on a Sunday night, over a long weekend — the hours a customer has free to sort the house out. A website chatbot answers then, while a competitor's phone rings out. That is the honest job AI for tradies does today, and nobody is charging you per call for it.

Pricing a job is a trade judgement, and it stays a trade judgement. The assistant reads back the rates you published, and everything past them travels to you as an enquiry. It puts no figure on work that has yet to be looked at. That is built in, and it holds on the day somebody leans on it.

• It writes down four things. Who is asking, what has gone wrong, where the property is, and when they could have you there. Lead capture asks for those before you spend a minute on the enquiry.
• It sends them straight on. An email alert goes to whoever you nominate, and the customer can keep typing to you on WhatsApp, with their first message carried across. Nobody starts the conversation over.
• It books nothing. There is no diary behind it, and your calendar sits well out of its reach. It collects the details, you pick the day, and the customer hears the day from you.
• Photos arrive after the handover. The chat window takes no uploads. Photos reach you only after a WhatsApp handoff, if the customer sends them there — which is where a picture of a leaking valve is worth having anyway.

You set those lines yourself, once, before it goes live. Guardrails and handoff is the screen where you say which subjects always reach a person. For most trade businesses that list is short: anything dangerous, anything involving an insurer, anything a customer is already unhappy about. Adoomi's own pages for plumbers and electricians set out where each trade tends to draw it.

An assistant that guesses a price once has made a promise you have to honour, in front of a customer holding a screenshot.

The two sides are priced on different principles, so a straight comparison rarely works. A person on your line is metered time. Software on your site is a subscription, and the price holds whatever kind of month you had.

Human call answering is sold per call or per minute, with a monthly minimum underneath it. Get both numbers in writing before you compare anything, because a low rate on top of a high minimum is still a high bill. Ask separately what an after-hours call adds. The figure that decides it sits on their tariff sheet, rather than on their homepage.

The website side is one flat figure, and a flat-out week costs the same as a quiet one. There are five plans. Free costs £0 and holds 50 message credits. Local is £8 with 200, Growth £20 with 500, Scale £75 with 4,000, Advanced £250 with 14,000. A credit goes each time the assistant answers — one per answer on the everyday models, more on the more advanced ones. Those are the sterling figures, and the pricing page shows all five in your own currency.

Going live is about ten minutes of work: point it at your site, read what it proposes to say, add one line to your pages. Read the middle bit properly. You are settling what a stranger gets told about your business, in writing, before anybody shakes your hand. The trial covers 14 days and 200 messages, and no card is needed.

A burst pipe at teatime, or a switchboard arcing behind a wall, belongs on the phone. Somebody in that spot needs a person fast, and a website assistant is the wrong tool for it — including this one. What it can do is say so in one line and show the number you published, at any hour, to somebody who has just found you and is worried.

So write the out-of-hours wording yourself. It belongs on your contact page regardless of what you buy after that, and three lines will do it.

1. What to do in the next minute. Water off at the meter, stay out of that room, leave the switchboard alone — whatever suits your trade. Written for somebody reading it on a phone with one hand.
2. Which number reaches a person. Your after-hours mobile, or the fault line your local network publishes. Only put a number here that you will actually answer, because the assistant is going to hand it out.
3. When to ring Triple Zero instead. In Australia, 000 is the emergency number for life-threatening or time-critical situations, free to call, and it reaches police, fire or ambulance. UK readers put 999 in that line. Your page names the situations you mean.

Once that wording exists, every option here should be repeating it exactly, instead of composing something of its own. A staffed team reads it off the brief. A written assistant reads it off the page. Neither of them decides how bad the job is, which is the one judgement that has to stay with a tradie.

Every supplier in this market is advertising, this page included. Five questions will tell you which parts are real, and each one has an answer somebody can show you rather than describe.

1. Which hours are genuinely covered? "Out of hours" means something different at every company. Ask which evenings, which weekend days, and what happens over a public holiday. Then ask what falls back to voicemail when the cover ends.
2. Who writes the answers? With a person on your line, it is a brief you wrote. With software it should be your own published pages and nothing else. Ask a supplier to point at the page a given answer came from. A supplier who cannot show you that page is guessing on your behalf.
3. What does a busy month cost? Take your busiest month from last year and ask for a quote against that, rather than an average one. Per-call pricing bills you hardest in exactly the month the work was going well.
4. Can I read a week of real chats? Real conversations, not a scripted demo, and the ones that went wrong are the useful half. Any supplier who will only show you a polished script has already chosen what you get to see.
5. What happens to a question it cannot answer? You want it to admit the gap and pass the whole message to you with the wording untouched. A product that fills gaps with a guess will do it on a price, in front of a customer.

One more, whichever side you buy: ask where the customer's words end up. Adoomi holds conversations on EU infrastructure. There is no Australian hosting option today. A GDPR request will export a conversation or erase it, the logs carry identifiers instead of what anybody typed, and the chat window is free of tracking cookies. None of it makes your business compliant with anything — compliance stays with your own registrations, your policies and how your team actually works. Ask a call-answering company the same thing before you sign, and keep their answer in writing.

Adoomi answers on your website, not on your phone line; tradies whose work arrives almost entirely as phone calls run a telephone answering service alongside it. If your customers find you by searching, start with the written half. It costs less and it reaches people earlier. The Free plan lets you watch it for a month before you spend anything.