Why we won't quote you the usual statistics
This industry's marketing leans on a handful of alarming figures about voicemail and callbacks that get passed from vendor site to vendor site, usually without a source you can actually read. Our site has a rule about that: a number renders only when it carries a citation. So this page does something more useful than statistics - it walks arithmetic you can verify against your own phone system, because your number is the only one that should sell you anything.
The four numbers
Calls per month: your phone system or mobile carrier already counts this. Count inbound only.
Missed rate: the fraction that ring out, hit voicemail, or arrive after close. Pull a normal week's log and count - most owners guess low, because the misses cluster in the hours you are not watching the phone.
Close rate: of the calls you do answer, the fraction that become paying work. Be honest; this is a sales-skill number, and it also quietly caps what any answering product can do for you.
Value of a won call: your average ticket, or for practices and firms, the first engagement's value. Using lifetime value inflates the result; using first-job value keeps the math conservative.
The multiplication, worked
Missed calls × close rate × job value = monthly cost of the misses. Take a plumbing company with 200 calls a month, a quarter missed, a 15% close rate, and $450 jobs: 50 missed calls, times 15%, is 7.5 jobs, times $450 is about $3,375 a month walking to whoever answered instead. Those inputs are our calculator's defaults - editable, clearly labeled as commonly cited averages rather than claims about your business - and the point of the exercise is to replace every one of them with yours.
Now the honest caveats, because the simple version flatters the product. Not every missed caller is lost - some call back, especially existing customers - so discount the missed count by the callbacks you genuinely get. And your close rate on recovered calls may be lower than on the calls you answer live, since some after-hours callers are price-shopping three firms at once. Cut the result in half if you want a floor. For most call-driven businesses it is still a large number.
What the number tells you to buy - which is sometimes nothing
If your honest number is a few hundred dollars a month or less, do not buy an answering product from us or anyone. A tighter callback habit and a voicemail greeting that sets expectations are free, and we would rather say that here than have you discover it after three invoices.
If the number is four figures, compare it to the fix: missed-call text-back at $250 to build plus $197 a month catches the callers willing to text; an AI agent from $197 a month answers the call itself and books the job. The arithmetic on this page is exactly the arithmetic to run against those prices - which is why our calculator shows its work instead of hiding the assumptions.
And if your misses are concentrated after hours - they usually are - price the after-hours tier, not the flagship. The cheapest option that answers the calls you actually miss is the right one; buying coverage for hours you already answer is how this industry pads invoices.
Common questions
Where do the calculator's default numbers come from?
They are commonly cited industry averages - $450-$500 jobs for plumbing and HVAC, $750 for dental, $2,000 for law-firm intake - presented as editable presets and labeled as exactly that, not as results from our clients. The calculator exists so you can overwrite every one of them with your own figures, which are the only ones that matter.
How do I find my real missed-call rate?
Pull one normal week from your phone system's call log and count calls that rang out, hit voicemail, or arrived outside open hours. Most systems - and mobile carriers - show this. One week of real data beats any industry average, including the ones we preset.
Isn't this page just a pitch with extra steps?
It is arithmetic that sometimes concludes you should buy nothing, and says so in plain text above. We publish our prices and the reasoning both, so you can reach the conclusion without a discovery call - that is the whole way this business operates.