Afterdesk

After-hours front desk · HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing

After 5pm, a missed ring is a lost job.

Homeowners calling a furnace, a leak, or a dead panel do not leave voicemail. They call the next company. Afterdesk answers the missed and after-hours calls, texts them back, qualifies the work, and books a slot on your calendar.

Get the $750 auditSee how it works

One offer. One location. English-speaking markets: US, UK, AU, CA.

Who this is for

1–20 truck home-service companies. Owners who still take overflow on their cell. Dispatchers who go home at 5. Shops already paying a human answering service and still finding empty mornings.

  • HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing
  • One location to start
  • You already have a calendar (ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, or Google)
  • After-hours volume is real — not a hobbyist one-van shop

Four steps. Then the truck is on the board.

This is not a chatbot on your website. It is the front desk that should have been on the line when the office went dark.

  1. 01

    Answer, or text back

    A missed ring or an after-hours call is picked up. If they hang up, Afterdesk texts the same number within a minute. The homeowner is talking to a desk, not a voicemail box.

  2. 02

    Qualify the job

    Trade, urgency, address, access, and whether it is in your service area. Afterdesk does not collect a “lead.” It decides if this is a job you actually run.

  3. 03

    Book a slot

    A real appointment on the calendar you already use — not “someone will call you in the morning.” Emergency windows, first-available, or the next morning dispatch block.

  4. 04

    Notify the owner

    You get the recap: who, where, what, when, and the transcript. Overnight jobs sit on the board when the first truck rolls. You are not mining a call log at 7:30am.

Why the answering service still drops the ball

You are not imagining it. Human answering services are good at picking up. They are not good at being your dispatcher. Afterdesk is built to compete with that line item, not with a chatbot demo.

They take a message

Ruby and AnswerConnect are built to answer the phone politely. The output is a note. The homeowner with a dead furnace at 9pm does not want a note. They want a truck.

They cannot see your calendar

Without live availability, the agent cannot offer 7:30am, a two-hour emergency window, or “the on-call tech is 40 minutes out.” So they default to callback.

The script does not know your shop

Trip fee, after-hours rate, which ZIP codes you run, whether a “no cool” in August is an emergency. Generic scripts dump those callers into the same bucket as a warranty question.

You still pay $300–$1,000 a month

That invoice is real. The booked jobs often are not. Afterdesk exists so the money you already spend on an after-hours desk actually holds the work.

What it costs

Three numbers. No packages, no “starter / growth / scale.” LLM and telephony usage is billed separately as pass-through, with a monthly cap.

Audit

$750

5 business days. Written missed-call leakage report and a scoped install proposal. Credited in full toward install if you start within 14 days.

Install

$3,000

One-time. Voice, SMS, and calendar for one location. 10 business days.

Keep it running

$800/mo

Monitoring, job-type updates, after-hours coverage, monthly missed-call report.

Get the $750 auditFull pricing