What CallsAround does
CallsAround answers your phone 24/7 with AI, and when the call is an emergency it does something most answering services do not: it dispatches. The AI flags the emergency (flooding, fire, gas leak, and no-heat are detected out of the box, and you can add your own trigger phrases), then works down your on-call list in order.
Each step in the chain has its own ring timeout, retry count, and contact method — call, call plus SMS, or SMS only. Answering-machine detection runs on every leg, so a voicemail box can never be counted as an answer. When a person actually picks up, they hear a short whisper with the caller’s name, address, and problem, then press 1 to accept. The caller stays on the line with the AI the whole time. If the chain is exhausted, the call forwards to your fallback number and the whole team gets alerted that it went uncovered.
Plans
| Plan | Monthly | Minutes | What’s added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $79 | 200 AI minutes, 50 SMS | AI answering, message taking, full REST API and webhooks |
| Receptionist | $149 | 500 | Warm transfers, Google Calendar availability checks |
| Dispatch | $229 | 800 | Emergency escalation chains, voicemail detection, SMS alert at every hop, fallback number |
| Dispatch+ | $299 | 1,200 | Outbound “technician en route” calls, priority support |
Overages are flat and published: $0.29, $0.25, $0.22, and $0.20 a minute by tier. No per-call fees and no contact-sales gate. Annual billing gives you two months free. Every plan starts with a 7-day trial that includes 100 live minutes and requires a card.
Who it fits
Shops that run emergency work and lose money when a 2 a.m. call goes to a message instead of a truck: water and fire restoration, HVAC no-heat and no-cool season, sewer and burst-pipe plumbing, and electrical outage work. The intake is trade-specific — the restoration template captures carrier, claim number, and adjuster; HVAC triage asks about elderly occupants, infants, and the outside temperature.
If your calls are mostly daytime quotes and scheduling, the escalation engine is not what you are buying and a cheaper answering AI will do.
Integrations and API
Jobber is native through one-click OAuth: every message becomes a Jobber client and request with the urgency in the request title. PSA by Canam Systems and ServiceMonster are also native. Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, ServiceTrade, and QuickBooks connect through Zapier on the message.taken webhook.
The API is on every plan, including the $79 Starter. There is a published OpenAPI 3.1 spec with endpoints for lines, escalation chains, calls with recordings, messages, usage, notifications, and webhook subscriptions. Outbound webhooks are HMAC-signed, fire on call completion, emergency dispatch, message taken, uncovered calls, failures, line health, and usage thresholds, and retry five times with a dead-letter queue.
Reliability
If the AI stack goes down, the phone number flips to plain call forwarding at the carrier level and flips back automatically when health probes pass. That failover sits below the application, so an outage in the AI does not take your phone line with it.
Try it
CallsAround offers a free after-hours line test, which is the fastest way to find out whether you actually have the problem the dispatch engine solves. Call your own after-hours number the way a customer would and see what happens to the call.
