Home › By industry › Contractors

Answering services for contractors: what they cost

The phone rings while you are on the roof, under a slab form or elbow deep in a wall, and by the time you check it the caller has already dialled the next name on their list. This page prices every answering service for contractors worth the money, AI and human, for a general or specialty operation, from $29 a month with a real caveat attached, up to $299 a month for unlimited flat-rate answering with CRM integrations built in.

Every figure comes from the vendor's own pricing page, checked in July 2026. Full comparison on the pricing index.

What calls does a contractor actually miss?

Construction work and phone availability are opposites by design. The moments you are earning the most, hands on a tool, both ears on a crew, are exactly the moments a bid call rings out.

• The bid call while your hands are full. A homeowner comparing three or four contractors calls each of them once. Whoever calls back first usually wins the walkthrough, regardless of who is actually cheaper or better.
• The estimate that goes cold overnight. You quote a job, the caller says they will think about it, and the follow-up window is measured in days, not weeks. Nobody following up on schedule is a slow leak in every pipeline.
• The first warm week of spring. Exterior trades in particular get buried the moment the weather turns: roofing, siding, decks, concrete, driveways. Everyone who put off a project all winter calls in the same two weeks.
• The supplier, inspector or permit office call you actually need. Trade numbers get hammered by spam and sales calls, so you stop answering unknown numbers, and then you stop answering real business too.
• The crew or subcontractor call from the jobsite. Not a lead, but urgent, and it gets buried in the same missed-call pile as everything else if there is no way to tell them apart.
• The evening call after bad news. A homeowner gets a bad inspection report or a burst pipe on a Tuesday and wants quotes before the weekend. An office-hours-only setup misses that entire decision window.

What one missed call costs you here

Contracting spans a huge range, so treat these as starting points, not a claim about your business. A punch-list repair or small job might land somewhere in the $275 to $1,150 range. A kitchen or bath remodel, an addition or a re-roof usually starts around $8,000 and climbs well into the tens of thousands. Use your own average job size, not these figures, once you have them.

Conversion is lumpy and depends heavily on how the caller found you. A referral converts far higher than a cold search click, and a same-day callback converts far higher than one two days later. If you take 30 calls a week during the spring rush, miss a quarter of them because every hand on the crew is holding a tool, and just one of those missed calls a month was a remodel that went to whoever called back within the hour, that single job is worth more than a year of any plan on this page.

The call that gets missed most often in the maths, and probably the most profitable one you take, is the repeat client or the referral. A past customer calling about a second project, or a neighbour calling because someone on the street mentioned your name, already trusts you before the phone rings. There is no competitive bid to lose, because in their mind there usually is no other call to make. Losing that call to a full voicemail box does not just cost the job, it teaches a warm lead to go looking for someone else, and that someone else keeps the relationship for every job after this one too.

Set your busiest month in the first field, not a slow one, and use your own average job value. Full workings on the missed call calculator.

Which service fits a contractor

NextPhone, when the spring rush would blow up a per-minute bill

NextPhone charges $199 a month on Pro for unlimited calls with no per-minute charges at all, and $299 on Growth, which adds CRM integrations including ServiceTitan, Clio and HubSpot, plus Zapier and webhooks. For a contractor whose call volume triples the first warm week and falls off a cliff in December, a flat bill is the entire point: a busy month costs the same as a quiet one. The caution is in their own wording: prices are quoted as "starts at", so confirm your number before signing. Check current NextPhone pricing.

Jobber AI Receptionist, if your crew already quotes and schedules through Jobber

Jobber sells call and text handling as a $29 a month add-on to any plan, included at no extra cost on the $499 Plus plan. Jobber is used across a wide range of home service and contracting trades, not one specialty, so if your estimators and schedulers already live inside it, the advantage is that a bid lands directly in the same system rather than in a separate inbox somebody has to retype. Price it honestly: the add-on needs a Jobber subscription underneath it, so the real entry point is closer to $78 a month, and Jobber does not publish how many calls or minutes the add-on covers. Check current Jobber pricing.

Dialzara, for booking and lead qualification on a tighter budget

Dialzara lists 24/7 answering, booking, lead qualification and calendar handling on every tier, in English and Spanish, with no setup fee. Business Pro is $99 a month for 220 minutes, Business Plus is $199 for 500 minutes, and Business Elite is $349 for 1,000 minutes. Ignore the $29 headline: 60 minutes works out to roughly one call a day, which makes it a trial tier rather than a working plan for anyone taking real bid volume. Overage is published clearly, which is rarer than it should be in this market: $0.45 a minute on Pro, down to $0.35 on Elite. Check current Dialzara pricing.

Smith.ai, if a bid call deserves a real qualifying conversation

Smith.ai bills per call rather than per minute, so a 40-second "are you taking new bids" call costs the same as a longer scoping conversation. Their AI plan runs $150 a month for 75 calls, at $2.00 per extra call, and there is a genuinely free tier covering 25 calls a month, then $3.00 per call after that, which is enough for a small crew testing whether this is worth paying for at all. For higher-value bids, live agents start at $300 a month for 30 calls, running a real scripted conversation, project type, rough budget, timeline, before you ever call back. Watch the direction of overage on the live plans: extra calls cost $11.50 each, more than the calls inside the plan. Check current Smith.ai pricing.

Why HVAC and plumbing get their own page

If part of your crew runs licensed HVAC or plumbing work, you already know that business behaves differently from general contracting. A no-heat call or a burst pipe is a same-hour emergency with a fairly narrow, testable script: is water actively flowing, is there gas involved, how fast can somebody reach the address. A bid call for a kitchen remodel or a new deck is not urgent in the same way, but it is far more valuable to qualify properly, because the intake needs to capture project type, scope and budget range well enough that you are not calling back blind. Building one page and one vendor list around both would flatten a real difference in how the calls should be scripted and priced.

That is why the emergency-dispatch maths and the vendors built for it live on their own pages instead of being repeated here: see AI receptionists for HVAC companies for the heat-wave and no-cool scenarios, and AI receptionists for plumbers for the burst-pipe economics. If your business is genuinely general contracting, remodels, additions, roofing, siding, concrete and similar project work, the vendors and the qualifying questions above are built for that call, not for a licensed-trade emergency.

Some businesses are genuinely both, a design-build firm with an HVAC division, or a remodeler who also holds a plumbing license. If that describes you, the practical answer is usually two scripts on one vendor rather than two separate services: most of the AI receptionists on both pages let you build more than one call flow or agent, so an emergency no-heat call can route one way and a bathroom remodel bid can route another, without paying for two accounts. Ask about that directly during the demo instead of assuming a single script has to cover everything your business does.

Prices side by side

Verified July 2026. All 17 vendors with published prices are on the pricing index.

What to ask before you sign

1. Does it capture project type, rough scope and timeline, not just a name and a callback number? A message alone still means calling back blind. That is not a qualified lead, whatever the vendor calls it.
2. What happens to a call when your hands are full? Voicemail, a warm transfer, or a text with the caller's details land very differently on a jobsite. Decide which one you actually need before comparing price.
3. How does a 10 to 12 minute "walk me through the project" call get billed? Dialzara charges $0.45 a minute past the bundle on Business Pro. Smith.ai charges the same flat amount per call regardless of length. Run your own average call length through both models, or read the break-even between per-minute and flat-rate billing first.
4. Can you turn volume up for the spring rush and down in the dead of winter, without a penalty? Look for a monthly term and a real trial: Dialzara offers 7 days, Smith.ai's AI tier is free up to 25 calls a month.
5. Does the lead land in the scheduling software your crew already uses, or in an inbox somebody retypes? Jobber puts it directly in the job system. Get any other integration named on the quote, not implied by a feature list.
6. How many calls can it take running at once? On the first warm Saturday of the year, every homeowner in town seems to decide to call for quotes on the same afternoon. A service that queues callers one at a time is a nicer voicemail, not a fix.

Overage is where most of these bills actually leak: what the per-minute and per-call headline rates leave out works the full bill through component by component.

Where to go next

For the licensed-trade emergency side of the business, see HVAC companies and plumbers for the dispatch maths that a bid-focused page like this one does not cover. If a share of your work comes through property managers coordinating renovations or turnovers across a portfolio, AI receptionists for property management companies shows how they are pricing the other side of that relationship. Every published plan is on the pricing index.