It does not touch your main line. It picks up when you are on the other line, when nobody answers, and after you have gone home — works out what kind of call it is, sorts it against rules you wrote, and either gets your on-call tech on the phone or books the slot and texts you the details.
Built for shops running one to three trucks in the US and Canada. English and Spanish.
When a caller says gas, carbon monoxide, fire, sparks or someone hurt, it does not book them, does not put them through to you, and does not “check first.” It says who it is, says it cannot help with this, tells them to hang up and call nine-one-one — from outside, if they are indoors, which is what the gas utilities and the CPSC say — says nobody is being sent, and hangs up so their line is free.
It matches words, so it can be beaten by words. Somebody who says “there’s a funny smell down here” and never says gas may get booked like any other job. We would rather you knew that before you bought it than after. Two things follow from it: every call that books anything ends with the same sentence about hanging up and calling 911, whatever the caller said and whether or not the list fired — a second check that does not depend on vocabulary at all. And once there are real calls, the miss rate gets measured and published to you, not estimated.
That decision is a fixed word list, not the model’s judgement. The model can raise its hand; it can never overrule the list, and it never sees the call until the list has cleared it. There is no setting that turns this off, for you or for us — not a default, not a toggle buried in the account page. It does not exist in the code.
It will sometimes fire on a call that turns out to be a broken gas stove. We think that is the right mistake to make, and you will get a text and a recording every time it happens.
Where that stands today
The word list and its logic are written and carry 440 automated
tests, including every case in the safety specification. The service refuses to
start if the word list does not match the version those tests signed off.
It has not yet been through a real phone call — that is the next step, and
nothing goes to a paying shop before it has. The tests are written against
invented calls, because no recording of a real after-hours plumbing call
exists to test against; that is a real limit and it is why the miss rate is
currently unknown rather than small.
The Spanish half is weaker than the English half and we can prove it: a
regional review produced 198 sentences a Spanish-speaking caller might
say, and the list handles 13 of them correctly. Spanish is therefore
not offered as a line language, and the Spanish words that do run are
being rebuilt against that corpus.
Whether no hot water is worth waking someone for is your call, not ours. You get a table of rules, in plain English, and you change any line of it. Every call records which rule fired and why, so you can argue with it.
Active leak nobody can shut off, sewage coming up, burst pipe. It rings your on-call phone, whispers the address and the one-line problem, and waits for a keypress before it puts them through. If nobody picks up it tries the backup, then texts everything and tells the caller when to expect a call back.
Water off and contained, one blocked fixture, no hot water. Nobody gets woken up. It captures the job and tells the caller who will text them, and by when.
A dripping faucet, a quote for a water heater. It takes the whole job down, reads it back to make sure it has it right, and puts a request on your calendar marked unconfirmed.
Gas, carbon monoxide, fire, an electrical hazard, someone hurt. The one above. This row is read-only.
Some of these are things we cannot afford to do well. Some are things that should not be automated at all. Either way, they are not coming later.
Includes 1,200 minutes — a lot more after-hours calls than a one-truck shop sees, even in a bad January. Past that it is 35¢ a minute, and you get an email at 80% of the allowance and again at 100%. You will never find out about an overage from your invoice.
The first twenty shops pay $149 a month, for life, with 600 minutes included and the same 35¢ past that. Why is there a cap on the founding plan when there is a bigger one on the standard plan? Because a cold snap can double a shop’s after-hours calls for a whole month, every January, and $149 does not cover that without a line like this one. We would rather show you the line than hide it.
No setup fee. Cancel it yourself, any time, without a retention call. 30 days, full refund.
The safety rule is built and tested. The call flow, the triage rules, the read-back and the evidence trail are built and tested. What has not happened is a single real phone call — the telephony is the next piece of work, and until it is done, anything on this page about how fast or how reliably it answers would be a guess.
When there is a number you can ring and hear it answer as your own company, that is when this page will ask you for anything.
If you run a shop and want to be told when that happens — or you want to argue with any of the above, which is more useful — write to hello@oncallbell.com. A person reads it. Support is email-first and always will be: it is one person, and pretending otherwise would be the first lie on the page.