FirstReply answers every call around the clock, hands the caller to a real person the moment they ask for one, books consultations straight into your calendar, and answers questions from your own documents. Flat monthly fee, no per-minute surprises.
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Most small businesses aren't choosing between an AI and a great front desk. They're choosing between an AI and nobody, because the phone rings after hours, during a job, or while the one person who answers it is already on another call. Callers don't leave a message. They call the next name on the list.
Accidents, burst pipes and toothaches don't keep business hours. Someone who calls at 7 PM and hears voicemail almost always books with whoever picks up next.
The second caller gets a busy signal or voicemail. They don't wait. In most small businesses this quietly costs more than after-hours ever does.
Hours go to callers asking your hours, your prices, and whether you cover their area. That's answerable without a human, and it's not what you hired one for.
Robocalls and sales pitches wear the phone out until people stop answering it carefully, and a real customer gets treated like one more interruption.
Without a written record of every call, there's no way to know how many people you missed, so there's no way to argue the leak is worth fixing.
A done-for-you system, not a chatbot you configure yourself. We build it around your business, put it on your number, and keep tuning it. Everything below runs today, on real calls.
Every inbound call, day or night, weekends and holidays included, on a real local number. It greets callers in your business's name and you can interrupt it mid-sentence, the way you would a person.
When someone asks for a human, or the call is clearly urgent, it dials you, says out loud who's on the line and what they want, and only then connects. You pick up already knowing the context. If you don't answer within 45 seconds, or your voicemail picks up, the call comes back to the assistant instead of dying.
It reads live availability on your calendar, offers two or three real times out loud, books the one they choose, confirms it back, and the invitation goes out by email. Nothing lands inside the next two hours, so nobody walks in on you unannounced.
Upload your price list, service area, hours, and what you don't take on. It answers from those, and when something isn't there it says it will find out and takes a message instead of inventing an answer.
Three steps, nothing to install, and your phone number doesn't have to move.
A fifteen-minute call about how your phone actually gets answered today. Then we write the script, load your documents, connect your calendar, and set who gets the warm transfer. Usually live within a week.
Keep your number with your current carrier and point it at the one we give you. Callers dial exactly what they always did. It takes minutes to switch on, and minutes to switch off if you change your mind.
Urgent callers reach you directly, with the assistant telling you first who's on the line. Everyone else turns into a lead card on your phone within seconds, and a full transcript in the portal.
The script, the questions it asks, and what counts as urgent are different for a law firm and a roofing crew. We write that part for you. Below are the three we've built the deepest playbooks for, but the assistant is configured from scratch for every client, so the list isn't a limit.
Collects what happened, when, and how to reach them, flags urgency, and books the consultation. Never gives legal advice, never quotes a fee, never says whether a case is good. Personal injury, immigration, family and criminal defence. See the personal injury playbook →
Answers what you treat, what it costs and when you're open, then books the consultation while the caller is still interested. Existing patients get flagged as such, so an urgent one isn't sitting behind three price questions.
Plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical. It answers while your crew is on a job, confirms you cover their area, sorts an emergency from a quote request, and gets you on the phone when it's the former.
Something else entirely, a dental office, a salon, a repair shop, a real estate team? Tell us how your calls go, we build the assistant around it. There's no template we're fitting you into.
One price a month. No per-minute overage, no telco line items, no charge per booking or per SMS. Competing answering services bill $1.85 to $2.75 a minute on top of a base plan, which is how a busy month turns into a surprise.
Local number, or keep the one you have
The answer to "I want to speak to a human"
Not a message saying someone will call back
Including what each call actually cost
We'd rather lose you here than after you've paid.
It doesn't pretend to be a person and doesn't borrow a human name to hide behind. For a regulated business that removes a complaint rather than creating one, and callers care far more about being answered than about who answered.
California is a two-party consent state, so we switch recording off at the platform level. You still get a written transcript and a structured summary, which is what you actually use, without holding audio you'd have to defend.
No outbound texts or call-backs, no Spanish, and no direct push into Clio or Salesforce. Those are on the roadmap and we'll tell you honestly where they are rather than let a feature list imply otherwise.
FirstReply is built and operated by IG Digital Lab (IGGO, LLC), an AI implementation agency at 3550 Watt Ave, Suite 408 in Sacramento. Same people build it, run it, and answer the phone when you call.
Almost every answering service in this market hides its pricing behind a form. We checked: of the twenty-two providers we priced in August 2026, nine make you fill in a form to learn what they charge. Here's ours.
Call (916) 618-0502 right now. That's our own front desk, not a recording. No form, nothing to sign up for.
We stand it up on our number, you forward your calls to it. Up to 100 minutes. Didn't work out? Turn the forwarding off. You owe nothing.
If it isn't earning its keep in the first month after you go live, we return the setup fee. No argument, no retention call.
The whole thing, managed for you. For any business where a missed call is a lost customer.
For law firms. A different product, not a surcharge: the intake script, the boundaries around it, and the guarantee are all different.
More than one line to answer, or more than 500 minutes a month. We quote it properly rather than pretend one number fits.
Why the flat fee matters. Answering services in this market bill $1.85 to $2.75 a minute once you pass your included block, and round every call up to the minute. At 300 minutes that's $555 to $825 on top of the base plan, in the month you were busiest. FirstReply is one number, and a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.
Because the honest comparison is not our AI against your receptionist, it is our AI against voicemail at 7:40 on a Friday evening. That is what actually answers today. And when a caller asks for a person, FirstReply calls one: it dials your phone, tells you who is on the line and what they want, and only then connects the call. The caller gets a human, and the human already knows why they are calling.
No. It introduces itself and does not impersonate a human. For regulated businesses that removes a category of complaint rather than creating one, and in practice callers care far more about being answered than about who answered.
No, and that is deliberate. California is a two-party consent state, so we disable call recording at the platform level. You still get a written transcript and a structured summary of every call, which is what you actually need, without the consent exposure that comes with storing audio.
It books. FirstReply checks live availability on your Cal.com calendar during the call, offers two or three real times out loud, books the one the caller picks, confirms it back to them, and the invitation goes out by email. Nothing is bookable inside the next two hours, so you never get ambushed.
You upload your own documents, price list, service area, hours, what you do and do not take on, and the assistant answers from them. If something is not in your documents, it says it will find out and takes a message instead of inventing an answer.
No. Keep your number with your current carrier and forward it to the number we give you. Your callers dial the same number they always did, and the AI answers. Setup takes minutes and you can undo it just as fast. If you would rather move the number to us permanently, we can port it.
A structured lead card within seconds: who called, the callback number, what they wanted, an urgency flag, whether they are an existing customer, and whether the call looks like spam. It also tells you whether the caller was on a mobile, a landline, or a VoIP line, which is the fastest way to spot a junk lead.
$500 one-time setup and $549 a month, flat, with up to 500 minutes included. Law firms that need an intake script and the 2-case guarantee are $749 a month. There is no per-minute overage and no long contract. First 14 days are free, and we refund the setup fee within 30 days if it is not working for you.
Tell us how your calls go today and we'll set the assistant up on our number so you can forward yours to it. Fifteen minutes on the phone, nothing to install, and you can undo it in a minute if it isn't for you.