Tradies do not have a call-answering problem, they have a hands-free problem: the phone rings while you are up a ladder, in a roof cavity or running a grinder. Choose on whether the service can tell an emergency from a quote request and get the emergency to you now, not on the per-call rate.
AiDial publishes this comparison and AiDial is one of the options in it. Providers were included because they publish enough to be checked, and rows are ordered by entry price, not by preference. Every figure comes from the provider’s own current public pages, checked on 25 August 2026.
Every answering service will tell a tradie the same thing: missed calls are missed jobs. True, and useless, because it does not help you choose between them. The useful question is narrower — when the phone is answered by someone who is not you, what can they actually do with the call?
Two calls, and they need opposite handling
A trade business gets two kinds of inbound call, and almost nothing else.
- The emergency. Burst pipe, no power, roof leaking in a storm, lock-out. High value, needs you now, and the caller will ring the next number on the list within a minute if nobody picks up. Whoever answers must be able to reach you tonight.
- The quote. Bathroom renovation, switchboard upgrade, re-roof. Much higher value, but the caller is comparison shopping and will speak to two or three others. Whoever answers must capture enough detail that you can quote without a second call, and book a site visit.
A message-taking service handles neither well. It handles both identically, which is the problem: the burst pipe and the “thinking about a new bathroom next year” arrive in your inbox looking exactly the same, and you find out which was which when you check your phone at six.
When someone rings at 4pm with a burst pipe and you are under a house with no signal, what happens in the next sixty seconds? Everything else is detail.
Why the storm week decides it
Trade call volume is not steady, and the exceptions are what break a plan. A hail storm, a cold snap, a heatwave, a blackout — plumbers, roofers, electricians and air-conditioning trades all have a version of the day when the phone rings forty times before lunch. That day is also the most profitable day of the quarter.
Two things go wrong at once on that day. On a per-call plan, your costs spike exactly when your call count does. And on a shared human roster, every caller after the first one waits — while forty other people in your suburb are ringing every other tradie in the same trade.
Swipe to compare →
| For trades | Virtual HQ | OfficeHQ | Oracle CMS | Your Phones Covered | AiDial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency handling | |||||
| Tells an emergency from a quote request | No message taken | Complex scripting from $49/mo | Custom scripting available | No | Yes triage rules you set |
| Reaches you out of hours | Message only transfers in business hours | On-call escalation from $49/mo | Plan dependent | Not published | Yes escalation rules you define |
| Storm day: simultaneous calls | Queued | Queued | Queued | Queued | Answered together |
| For trades | Virtual HQ | OfficeHQ | Oracle CMS | Your Phones Covered | AiDial |
| Turning the call into a job | |||||
| Books the job into your calendar | MyDiary add-on $49/mo plus $2.99 per minute, setup from $99 | MyDiary from $49/mo | Not published | Diary add-on | Included |
| Captures enough detail to quote | Name and number | Scripted questions | Scripted questions | Name and number | Yes job type, address, access, urgency |
| Written record of the call | Email message | Email message | Yes | “Every Call Reported by Email” | Transcript and summary |
| For trades | Virtual HQ | OfficeHQ | Oracle CMS | Your Phones Covered | AiDial |
| Commercials | |||||
| Published entry price | $25/mo message, $33/mo reception, plus GST | $25/mo message, $33/mo reception, plus GST | approx. $25/mo for 15 calls | “from $4 a Week”, “from $1.33 per Call” | $149/mo Core, 60 calls |
| Storm month: 100 calls | $275.00 message, $422.00 reception | Not published | Not published | Not published | $248.60 |
| Out-of-hours surcharge | $1.00 per call reception; $0.60 message | Not published | Not published | Not published | None |
The honest arithmetic for a one-van business
Most tradies reading this take somewhere between fifteen and forty calls a month, and per-call message-taking is genuinely cheaper at that volume. It is worth saying plainly rather than burying it.
| Calls in the month | Message-taking $25 + $2.50 per call | Live reception, PAYG $33 + $3.89 per call | AiDial Core $149 flat, 60 calls included |
|---|---|---|---|
| 15 — quiet month | $62.50 | $91.35 | $149.00 |
| 40 — normal month | $125.00 | $188.60 | $149.00 |
| 60 — busy month | $175.00 | $266.40 | $149.00 |
| 100 — storm month | $275.00 | $422.00 | $248.60 |
Message-taking wins below about fifty calls a month; the flat plan wins above it, and the gap widens on your busiest month. Virtual HQ figures exclude GST as published and exclude the out-of-hours surcharge, which applies to every call outside 8am–6pm weekdays. AiDial does not state GST treatment on its pricing page.
But run the other number too. If one emergency callout is worth a few hundred dollars and one bathroom quote is worth five figures, the plan difference on this table is noise. The reason to move off message-taking is not cost, it is that a message does not stop the caller ringing the next tradie while they wait for you to read it.
Five questions to put to any provider
- How does an emergency get to me, and how fast? Ask them to walk through it, including what happens if you do not answer the first attempt.
- What does the message contain? A name and number means you make the first real call. Job type, address, access and urgency means you can quote or dispatch straight away.
- What happens on the storm day? Ask about ten calls in ten minutes, because that is the day the service earns its keep or does not.
- Is after-hours charged differently? Check the terms, not the pricing page. Most trade emergencies are after hours by definition.
- Can it book into my calendar, and is that extra? Diary features are commonly a paid add-on with their own setup fee.
Where each one is genuinely the right answer
Sole trader, under fifty calls a month, you mostly answer your own phone
Message-taking, pay as you go
You want an Australian human on every call and volume is steady
Oracle CMS
Emergency work is most of your revenue and after-hours is most of your emergencies
Flat-rate AI reception
Your volume spikes with weather and your worst month must not produce your worst invoice
Flat-rate AI reception
Several vans, and jobs need dispatching to whoever is closest
Flat-rate AI reception with routing rules
Sources and method
Provider figures were read from each provider’s own current public pages on 25 August 2026. Nothing here comes from a review site or a third-party comparison, and where a provider does not publish a figure the table says so rather than estimating it. Job values are described in general terms rather than quoted, because they vary by trade, state and scope.
| Provider | Source, checked 25 August 2026 |
|---|---|
| AiDial | aidial.com.au pricing page: plan fees, included calls, extra-call rates, setup and contract terms |
| Virtual HQ | Call answering pricing page for Message Express and Virtual Receptionist rates; terms and conditions for the out-of-hours surcharge; FAQs for the follow-the-sun statement |
| OfficeHQ | Pricing page: entry prices, complex scripting and on-call escalation from $49/mo, MyDiary from $49/mo, “Plus GST” |
| Oracle CMS | Live phone answering service page: indicative pricing, 24/7 all-year operation, Australian call centres |
| Your Phones Covered | Pricing page: published “from” rates, per-call billing, Australian and offshore team tiers |
Prices change. Anything here more than six months old will be removed rather than shown stale.
Frequently asked questions
What does an answering service cost a tradie?
Message-taking starts around $25 a month plus about $2.50 a call, live reception around $33 a month plus about $3.89 a call, and flat-rate AI reception at $149 a month. At forty calls a month that is roughly $125, $189 and $149 respectively, before GST and before any out-of-hours surcharge.
Is an AI receptionist better than a human for trades?
For steady, low volume with straightforward calls, a human service is perfectly good and often cheaper. AI wins on the two things trades hit hardest: several calls landing at once, and a flat cost when the weather makes your month. A human operator covering many businesses cannot know your trade; a configured AI can ask the questions you would ask.
Can it stop me losing quote enquiries to competitors?
Partly, and be sceptical of anyone who claims more. Answering the call keeps you in the running where a voicemail usually does not. Capturing job type, address and access means you can respond with something useful rather than ringing back to ask what the job is — which is where most quote enquiries are actually lost.
Do I still need my own after-hours phone?
Usually yes, and that is the point. The service is the filter, not the replacement — it decides what is worth waking you for and handles everything else until morning. Check that the escalation actually reaches you, including the fallback when the first attempt fails.
Talk to an Australian team about it
AiDial is an Australian AI receptionist and answering service, hosted and processed in Australia, answering several callers at once, triaging emergencies to rules you set, and priced flat so the storm week is not your most expensive one. Tell us your trade and your call pattern and we will work out what it would actually cost.
See the AI receptionist for tradies, the plumber answering service and the electrician answering service, compare the after-hours options, check what each answering service tier really costs, or read how the AI providers compare.
