Guide · AI Receptionists
The AI receptionist built for HVAC and plumbing bills in credits, not minutes — here's how that math works
ServiceAgent is the rare receptionist sold for the home-services trades, but its credit model hides the per-minute rate. We convert it back to dollars and line it up against the flat-rate generalist alternative.
Re-verified 2026-06-22. ServiceAgent’s pricing page now states a per-credit cost of $0.02–$0.04 (so ~$0.30–$0.60 per voice-minute) and no longer publishes a flat per-minute overage; an earlier version of this guide used a lower $0.15/min figure, now corrected. Plan prices, credit bundles, and Goodcall’s pricing are unchanged. ServiceAgent has also added a free Launch ($0) tier and a Jobber integration.
If you run an HVAC, plumbing, or other home-services shop and want a receptionist built for your trade rather than a generalist retrofit, the answer in this dataset is ServiceAgent — and the first thing to understand is that it doesn’t sell you minutes. It sells credits. Its paid plans run $39/mo (Core), $95/mo (Growth), and $279/mo (Franchise) (plus a free Launch tier), bundling 2,000, 6,000, and 20,000 credits respectively, all with 20% off annual. Voice answering burns 15 credits per minute, and the page prices credits at $0.02–$0.04 each — so roughly $0.30–$0.60 per voice-minute, with the larger bundles working out toward the low end. If every credit went to voice you’d get roughly 133, 400, and 1,333 voice minutes a month. That “if” is the catch, because the same credits also fund SMS and ad features, so those minute figures are a ceiling, not an allowance.
What the credit model actually costs per call
The honest way to read ServiceAgent is to convert the credits back to a per-minute rate and price a realistic workload. A home-services call — booking a furnace tune-up, dispatching a leak — runs a few minutes. Say you take 300 voice-minutes a month:
| Plan | Monthly | Credits | Voice ceiling | Cost at 300 voice-min |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Core | $39 | 2,000 | ~133 min | ~167 min over → buy ~2,500 credits ≈ $90–$140 |
| Growth | $95 | 6,000 | ~400 min | $95 (within allowance) |
| Franchise | $279 | 20,000 | ~1,333 min | $279 (within allowance) |
On Core, 300 minutes blows past the ~133-minute ceiling. ServiceAgent no longer publishes a flat overage rate — you simply buy more credits, and at $0.02–$0.04 each the extra ~167 minutes (≈2,500 credits) run roughly $50–$100, putting a 300-minute Core month around $90–$140. Growth absorbs the same 300 minutes inside its 6,000-credit allowance at a flat $95. Inside a bundle the effective voice rate is about $0.21–$0.29/min and falls as the bundle grows; the real uncertainty is the overage, because the only published number above the ceiling is the $0.02–$0.04 credit cost. And because credits are shared, any SMS or ad-creative use pulls minutes off these ceilings — the figures above assume you spend every credit on voice.
The generalist alternative: Goodcall’s flat unlimited minutes
The other way to cover the trades is a generalist that doesn’t meter voice at all. In this dataset that’s Goodcall, whose plans run $79/mo (Starter), $129/mo (Growth), and $249/mo (Scale) with 15% off annual — and every one is unlimited minutes. The cap isn’t talk time; it’s unique customers per month: 100 on Starter, 250 on Growth, 500 on Scale, with $0.50 per additional unique customer above the cap.
That single difference reframes the whole comparison. ServiceAgent’s bill scales with how long you talk; Goodcall’s scales with how many distinct people call. For a home-services business, the unique-customer cap is the more natural meter — one customer often means one job, and a long dispatch call costs Goodcall nothing extra.
| ServiceAgent | Goodcall | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | $39/mo (Core) | $79/mo (Starter) |
| Meter | ~$0.30–$0.60/voice-min (15 credits/min @ $0.02–$0.04) | Unlimited min; 100 unique customers |
| Overage | buy more credits ($0.02–$0.04 each); no flat rate published | $0.50 / extra unique customer |
| Annual | 20% off | 15% off |
| Built for | Home services | Generalist |
How to choose between them
The crossover is volume of talk, not volume of calls. ServiceAgent’s $39 Core is the cheapest sticker in this pairing, and if your call volume stays inside ~133 voice-minutes it’s genuinely the floor — $31.20/mo on annual. But the moment your minutes climb, the credit meter runs at $0.02–$0.04 a credit (≈$0.30–$0.60/min), and a busy 300-minute month lands Core around $90–$140 — already past Goodcall’s flat $79 Starter, which from there answers unlimited minutes for the same flat price until you cross 100 unique customers.
So the rule is simple. If your shop fields a modest number of calls and you want the lowest possible floor — plus the trade-specific framing ServiceAgent is built around — start on Core at $39 (or Growth at $95 if you’d rather not watch the meter). If you field a high volume of talk-time, or long dispatch calls, the flat unlimited-minute structure of Goodcall Starter at $79 stops the per-minute clock entirely and only charges you for genuinely new customers.
One caveat the dataset is explicit about: ServiceAgent does not publish HIPAA, BAA, or bilingual support, and neither does Goodcall publish HIPAA or BAA. Goodcall lists Zapier and Google Voice; ServiceAgent now confirms a Jobber integration (plus calendar sync) on its page, though deeper field-service hooks like ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro remain unconfirmed. For a plain HVAC or plumbing front desk that rarely matters — but if you’re routing into a specific field-service CRM, confirm the integration before you commit, because the published record stops short of guaranteeing it.