How Usage Is Counted
Voice minutes, text segments, and what is never metered.
On this page
Two things are metered: time on calls, and the text messages we send to your customers. Everything else in your account is included in the monthly base.
Voice minutes
$0.12 a minute. Each call is rounded up to the next whole minute, so a 3 minute 10 second call counts as 4.
The rounding is worth knowing about, because it means a lot of short calls cost more than the raw seconds suggest.
What that looks like
Thirty calls averaging 2 minutes 20 seconds each bill as 3 minutes each, so 90 minutes rather than 70. At $0.12 that is $10.80 instead of $8.40.
Calls we don’t bill
We don't bill calls under 15 seconds, calls where the caller never says what they're calling about, calls our spam screening flags, or calls the receptionist identifies as a robocall or a sales pitch to your business. If one ever shows up on your statement, tell us and we'll credit it.
Those calls still show in your call history, marked as not billed, so you can see what came in.
Transferred calls
If you’ve turned transfers on and a caller is put through to your team, the time they spend talking with your team is billed at $0.12 a minute, the same as any call minute. It shows on your statement as its own line, Transferred to your team, so you can tell it apart from the receptionist’s time.
Text segments
Texts we send to your customers are $0.03 a segment. A segment is roughly 160 characters. A longer message counts as more than one, which is why keeping follow-up texts short is cheaper as well as better to receive.
Watch for the accidental second segment
What is never metered
- Logins
- Add as many team members as you like. Seats are free.
- Alerts to you and your team
- The texts and emails we send you about new leads and bookings are free.
- Incoming texts
- Texts your customers send in are not charged.
- Leads and contacts
- No cap, and no per-record charge.
- Transcripts and summaries
- Stored at no extra cost.
- Dashboards and reports
- Included.
- Knowledge base documents
- Uploading and indexing your files costs nothing.
A missed call costs nothing
A call that rings out and never reaches us is not billed, because there was nothing to bill.
Worth saying plainly because it is the opposite of how an answering service with a monthly minimum works. You’re charged for calls that were answered (less the ones above that we don’t bill), not for the capacity to answer them.
Both are voice minutes at the same per-minute rate. An outbound follow-up call is metered exactly like an inbound one.
Usually it isn’t billed. A caller who hangs up during the greeting hasn’t said what they’re calling about, and that’s one of the calls we don’t bill. If one does show up on your statement, tell us and we’ll credit it.
Something on your usage look wrong?