Your phone goes quiet at 6pm. Your shop doesn't have to.
An AI after-hours answering service for small business. Answers every missed call, texts the caller back within a minute, captures the lead, and drops the transcript in your inbox, nights, weekends, holidays. 24/7 coverage, one-time $2,000 build, you own the rig. No $400-a-month answering-service bill.
§ 01Why an AI after-hours answering service.
Most small businesses lose 30–50% of after-hours calls to voicemail nobody checks until morning. A traditional 24/7 answering service patches that gap for $200–$600 a month, forever, and most of what those operators do is read a script and take a message. An AI answering service does the same job without the monthly bill, without the per-minute charge, and without the handoff delay. The rig answers the call, texts the caller back, and gives you the lead before you've finished dinner.
24/7 coverage
Nights, weekends, holidays. Same response inside the rig at 2am on Sunday as 10am on Tuesday.
Under a minute
Caller gets the text back before the missed-call notification stops vibrating. Speed is the conversion lever.
You own the rig
Source, prompts, phone number, SMS provider, hosting. Yours on day one. Cancel us, the rig keeps running.
§ 02What the after-hours rig actually does.
Five jobs. The same five jobs a $400/month virtual receptionist for small business does, minus the receptionist, the monthly fee, and the 30-second on-hold transfer.
Answers the missed call
Caller dials your main line. You don't pick up in three rings. The rig answers on SMS within a minute with the question your customer actually wanted answered, booking, hours, address, service area, price range.
Captures the lead
Name, callback number, what they need, when they need it. Same fields every traditional answering service would log, but in your CRM or inbox in seconds, not in tomorrow morning's batch report.
Books the appointment
If the caller wants to book, the rig pulls your calendar, offers two slots, and writes the appointment. You wake up to a confirmed booking, not a list of voicemails to call back.
Triages the emergency
If it sounds urgent (water on the floor, no heat, locked out), the rig flags it priority-one, captures a direct callback number, and pings you on whatever channel you actually check.
§ 03$2,000 once. Not $400 a month forever.
Smith.ai, AnswerConnect, MAP Communications, AnswerForce, Ruby, Moneypenny, ReceptionHQ, AnswerMTI and every other 24/7 answering service in the top-20 SERP runs on monthly recurring revenue. The cheapest plan that actually covers nights and weekends is $200/month. The realistic plan for a working shop is $400–$600/month. That's $4,800–$7,200 a year, every year, forever, for software answering a phone.
$2,000 fixed. One time.
Two weeks. Fixed scope. The rig answers every missed call, texts back in under a minute, captures the lead, drops it in your inbox 24/7. You keep the source code, the phone number, the SMS provider, the hosting, the prompts. If we estimate wrong, we eat it. The number on the proposal is the number on the invoice.
NO RETAINER REQUIRED
§ 04How a two-week build runs.
SCOPE CALL
60 minutes. We listen to the kinds of calls you actually get after 6pm, what you need answered, what gets flagged. No deck.
BUILD
Port the number, wire the SMS rig, write the prompts for your shop's voice, hook the calendar, set up the inbox routing. Friday demo.
TUNE + SHIP
Run live calls through the rig. Tune the voice, the SMS scripts, the triage logic. Sign-off on the Friday demo. Lights on Monday.
HANDOFF
You get the source, the prompts, the runbook, the access. If you want us on a small monthly to tune, you can. If you don't, you don't.
§ 05Honest objections.
Five things buyers ask · before they signIs this a real person?
No. It's an AI rig. The voice and SMS scripts are tuned for your shop so the caller gets the answer they came for (booking, address, hours, quote) without waiting on a human. A traditional answering service charges $200–$600/month forever to do less. This is $2,000 once and you own the rig.
What if the AI can't answer?
It fails safe. Anything it can't resolve (emergency, unusual ask, angry customer) gets captured as a transcript and an SMS lead in your inbox within seconds, with a callback number and a summary. You decide whether to ring back same-night or next morning. You never lose the lead.
How is this different from Smith.ai?
Smith.ai is a monthly subscription. $255/month and up, per-minute charges on top. Cancel the subscription, coverage stops. Pulp builds the rig once for $2,000 fixed, hands you the source code, walks. No recurring. No per-minute. You own it.
What calls does it actually handle?
Booking and appointment requests, address and hours lookups, service-area questions, basic price ranges, quote intake with photos, emergency triage with callback capture, and the long tail of after-hours questions that otherwise sit until morning.
§ 06One operator. Same one writing the code.
The human you're talking to today is the one writing the code.
That's the whole pitch. No project manager, no junior associate, no offshore handoff. Same operator on the scope call, in the build, on the Friday demo, in the runbook on day 15. If you want a SaaS dashboard and a sales team, that's a fair tell, we're probably not the shop.
Three things we say no to.
Per-minute billing. Fixed-fee or nothing.
Open-ended retainers. If you don't need us, you don't pay us.
Reselling SaaS. If a $50/month tool already does it, we'll point you at it.
Pulp·AI·Studio