The verdicts

Torklio is the strongest fit on this site for owners who measure the phone by booked jobs, not answered calls. Grading, calendar booking with a conflict check, screened transfers to your own crew and a single customer record across phone and chat cover most of the workflow a trade needs. Weigh the gaps: SMS is still marked coming soon, there is no public API, and outside CRM connectors are pending verification.

Starting price: $99/mo

The publisher of this website has a financial interest in Torklio.

Smith.ai is the provider to shortlist when a real person must be reachable on the calls an AI cannot close, such as a distressed homeowner or a commercial property manager who refuses to talk to software. The trade-off for a service business is a post-call workflow that is less trade-specific than purpose-built tools, and per-call pricing that works out to about $10 a call on the $300 entry plan before the $1.50-per-call scheduling add-on.

Starting price: $300/mo

Goodcall covers the first three steps of the workflow, answer, understand and capture, with very little setup, which makes it a sensible pick for a one-truck operation that mostly needs to know who called and why. It is not the tool for calendar-driven booking with conflict checks or multi-crew routing. Pricing is $79 per agent per month with unlimited minutes, metered instead by unique customers, and the Starter plan keeps call details for only seven days.

Starting price: $79/mo

Rosie is the least-setup option on this site: forward your number, let it answer, read the message. For a solo operator whose problem is missed calls rather than a missing process, that is exactly enough, and at $49 a month for 250 minutes it is the cheapest verified plan that does it. Know the catch: the $49 plan cannot transfer a call or book directly on your calendar. Those arrive on the $149 Scale plan, which is where Rosie starts competing on workflow rather than price.

Starting price: $49/mo

Dialzara is the verified budget pick on this site: $29 a month buys 60 receptionist minutes with appointment scheduling, call routing and CRM/calendar integration included, and the overage is published at $0.48 a minute. For a low-volume trade whose missed calls are an annoyance rather than a lost job, that is enough. Sixty minutes is a handful of service calls, though, and a shop that runs 200 minutes should price the $99 Pro plan (220 minutes) rather than pay overage on Lite.

Starting price: $29/mo

Frontdesk is the bundle option: for $99 a month a trade owner gets phone answering with 200 voice minutes, SMS, a website chatbot, appointment scheduling, call transfers, a built-in CRM and Zapier, with a published overage of $0.25 a minute. It is a credible pick for an appointment-driven business that wants texting today. What the pricing page does not settle is how deep the qualification and booking logic go, so test a real booking during the 7-day trial before trusting it with the calendar.

Starting price: $99/mo

Synthflow is no longer a realistic option for a small trade business. As of September 7, 2026 its pricing page shows enterprise contracts only, starting at $30,000 a year and scoped to call volume, concurrency, telephony and integrations, with no self-serve monthly plan and no free trial. The platform still does what it did, custom inbound and outbound agents with vendor-led implementation, but the buyer is now a franchise group or a multi-location operator with a budget, not an owner with two trucks.

Starting price: Pricing verification needed

Retell AI is a developer platform: it supplies the engine, telephony and APIs, and your developers or an agency build the receptionist on top. A plumbing company should not buy it directly; a company building software for plumbers might. Pricing is pay-as-you-go with no monthly fee, from about $0.07 to $0.31 a minute all-in depending on the model and voice you choose.

Starting price: $0/mo

Vapi offers the deepest customization of anything reviewed on this site, and that is precisely why an owner should not buy it as a receptionist: you must build and maintain the agent with engineers. Every workflow step is available and none is pre-built. Costs stack a $0.05-a-minute platform fee on pass-through model, voice and telephony charges, which drop to zero for the model layer if you bring your own API keys.

Starting price: $0/mo

Slang AI is a restaurant product and should be judged as one: it is built for reservations, hours and menu questions, and it is not designed for service businesses or trades. This review exists so a restaurant owner who lands here is pointed to a vertical tool, and so a contractor does not mistake it for one. It integrates with OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp and Fishbowl and starts at $399 per location per month.

Starting price: $399/mo