The call you couldn’t take
became someone else’s job.

fonea starts at $90 per month including 120 minutes of talk time, with no per-call charges, no setup fee, and no annual contract. The flat rate is the part that matters for a trade with a season: traditional answering services bill per call or per minute, so the week a cold snap brings forty no-heat calls is the week the invoice jumps. Here a busy week and a quiet week cost the same. Shops taking 10 to 50 calls a day usually need the $290 plan with 500 minutes.

fonea does, on the first ring, at the same price as a Tuesday afternoon. It greets the caller with your company name, works out whether this is a no-heat emergency or a routine request, and either transfers the caller to whoever is on call or books them into the first open slot. You wake up to a list of what came in and what was already handled, rather than a voicemail box you have to work through before the first job.

You define it, in your own words. Most shops set no heat, no water, an active leak, a gas smell, sewage backup, and storm damage with water coming inside as emergencies, and everything else as a booked or logged request. When a caller describes something on your list, fonea captures the address and a callback number first, then transfers to the tech on call, so the details survive even if the call drops. Everything else stays off the on-call phone.

Yes. Connected to Google Calendar or Microsoft 365, fonea sees your real availability and books the service call or the estimate while the caller is still on the line, with your job durations and buffer times respected. Every call also comes back as a structured summary by email or text with the name, cell phone number, address, and problem description, so it drops straight into whatever dispatch board you already use.

Yes, and the morning after a storm is where it earns its keep. Roofing demand arrives all at once: a hundred homeowners calling the same four contractors in the same two hours. fonea answers several at the same time on the Professional plan, separates active leaks from estimate requests, books inspections, and collects the address and the details you ask for. Nobody sits on hold, and nobody has to hang up and call your competitor because your line was busy.

Yes. Towing is the case where hold time is the entire product, because a stranded caller will hang up and dial the next number in about fifteen seconds. fonea picks up instantly, takes the location, direction of travel, vehicle description, and callback number, checks the caller is somewhere safe, and passes the job to the driver on call. It answers several stranded callers at once, which a single dispatcher cannot.

Yes, and seasonality is the reason to bother. Spring cleanup and the first snow generate weeks of call volume that no office can staff for and no year can justify hiring against. fonea takes the quote requests, the property size, and the address, books estimates, and tells a caller when their address is outside your service area, before a truck rolls. Off-season, the same line costs the same $90 and quietly handles the trickle.

Yes. Pest control calls are urgent in a way that is emotional rather than structural: someone has just seen something in their kitchen and wants a person to answer. fonea picks up, takes the pest, the property type, and the address, books the inspection, and flags the ones you have told it to treat as same-day. Recurring service customers calling to reschedule get handled without touching a technician.

Yes. A salon phone rings while both hands are in someone’s hair, which is exactly when a booking is lost. fonea answers, offers the slots your calendar actually has free, books the appointment with the right service duration, and texts a confirmation. Cancellations and reschedules come in the same way, so the chair that opens up on Saturday gets refilled instead of sitting empty.

Yes. fonea works through standard call forwarding, which every US carrier supports on landlines, VoIP lines, and cell phones, so the number on your trucks and your Google listing stays exactly as it is. There is no porting and no new contract to unwind. Booking connects to Google Calendar or Microsoft 365, and every call summary arrives by email or text in a form you can paste into your dispatch software.

Callers are always told. fonea discloses at the start of every call that the caller is speaking with a digital assistant, and that disclosure cannot be disabled. Recording is a separate setting. Storing call recordings is on by default, and you can switch it off yourself in your dashboard settings: there is a company-wide master switch and one per assistant, and audio is stored only when both are on. Turning it off stops the audio being stored, not the service, so you still get the transcript and the call summary. Most states allow recording with one party’s consent, while California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Washington are among the states requiring all parties to consent, so the setting is yours to match to the rule that applies to you and to your callers. fonea also creates no voiceprints and no biometric profiles.

Within 24 hours, not weeks. You keep your existing number and set up forwarding from any US carrier, which most shops do in a few minutes. Then you configure your emergency list, your service area, your job types and durations, and the questions you get every day. Forwarding can be switched back off just as fast, so trying it does not put your line at risk.