About Answerley
Answerley answers the phone for small businesses that cannot get to it — after hours, mid-job, or when three calls arrive at once. It picks up in your business name, asks what you told it to ask, and puts the genuinely urgent calls through to you. This page is what we can tell you about how it works and where it stops.
Why it exists
A missed call is the cheapest thing to fix and the most expensive to ignore
A tradesperson under a sink cannot answer a phone. Neither can one on a roof, or one asleep at 2am when a pipe lets go. The options have been voicemail, which loses the callers worth having, or a human answering service at $250 to $700 a month billed by the minute, which prices out most of the businesses that need it most. Answerley exists because that gap is now closable at a price a two-van business can justify.
How it works
What actually happens on a call
- 1
It reads your website before it answers anything
During setup it crawls the site you give it and pulls out your services, hours, service area and anything you publish about pricing. That draft is shown to you to correct before a single call is answered, because the fastest way to sound like a stranger is to be confidently wrong about what you sell.
- 2
It answers on the first ring, in your business name
There is no hold queue and no menu. The greeting is the one you wrote, and it is the same at 2am as at 2pm.
- 3
It asks the questions you configured, in your order
Not a generic intake form. You decide what has to be captured before anyone is called — the address, whether water is still running, whether anyone is without heat — and those are asked on every call.
- 4
It decides what is urgent using your rule, in your words
You describe an emergency the way you would to a new employee. Calls that match it transfer live to whoever is on call; everything else becomes a summary waiting for you.
- 5
Spam is answered, recognized and ended politely
It is not blocked — the phone still rings and the agent still answers, then judges the call against your own spam rule and ends it. Those calls are never counted against your plan.
What it will not do
The limits, published
Anyone can write that they care about your customers. These are the constraints we hold every page on this site to, so you can check them rather than take them on trust.
No HIPAA claims, so no medical or dental
We do not offer a Business Associate Agreement, so we do not sell into covered entities and we do not publish pages targeting them. Ranking for medical answering terms would acquire customers we cannot lawfully serve properly, which is a worse outcome than the traffic is worth.
It does not give clinical, legal or safety advice
On a veterinary call it captures the animal and the history and gives the emergency referral you configured. On an electrical call it relays your instruction — leave the property, call 911 — and nothing of its own. It never improvises guidance.
Appointments are requests unless you connect a calendar
By default it captures the request with the caller's preferred window and sends it to you; nothing enters your diary without you. Connect Google Calendar or Outlook and it can check the time a caller asks for and confirm it live when that time is free. It never reads your diary out to a caller or offers them a list of slots — the agent is explicitly instructed not to, because it cannot see one. We say which mode you are in rather than blurring the two.
Transcripts on this site are illustrative
The sample calls are scripted examples. The voice you hear is genuinely the product's, but every caller is invented — a real call has two parties, and the second one never agreed to be published.
No per-minute billing, and the overage is published
Flat monthly with a call allowance, from $49. Go over and we keep answering at 90¢ to 60¢ per extra call depending on plan, with an email at 80% of your allowance and again when you reach it. If the next plan up would cost you less, we say so.
No claims about our own numbers
You will not find a customer count, a call volume or an accuracy percentage anywhere on this site. We do not have a denominator we would be willing to defend, and a statistic without one is decoration.
Getting hold of us
Who to talk to
Email support@answerley.com or use the contact form and a person reads it.