What HVAC companies pay for phone cover
HVAC is the clearest case in this market for reading the overage rate before the headline price. Your phone doesn't ring evenly. It ticks over in October and then a cold snap arrives and three days produce a month's calls, all of them from people whose heating has failed and who are working down a list of numbers.
That shape breaks minute bundles. A 300-minute plan sized against a normal month is gone by the Wednesday of a bad week, and at that point the rate matters more than everything else on the rate card. PATLive charges $1.89 a minute past its $479 plan. Rosie doesn't publish a rate at all.
So the question for a heating company isn't what the plan costs. It's what the worst week costs, and whether you can find that out before it happens.
A normal month against a cold-snap month, 3 minutes a call
| Service | 160 calls (480 min) | 480 calls (1,440 min) |
|---|---|---|
| GreetKeeper Starter | $49 + 0 overage = $49 | $49 + 280 × $0.45 = $175 |
| GreetKeeper Professional | $149 | $149, inside the 750 allowance |
| PATLive | $759 plan, 500 min | $2,899 plan, 2,000 min |
| Dialzara | Elite $349, 1,000 min | $349 + 440 min at $0.35 = $503 |
| Rosie | $299 plan, 2,000 min | $299, then an unpublished rate |
| Posh | Lavish $975, 500 min | Exclusive $1,900 + 440 at $1.90 = $2,736 |
Read on each vendor's own pricing page, September 2026. The cold-snap column is three times the normal month, which is a planning assumption rather than a measurement.
What moves an HVAC phone bill
- Seasonality. The first freeze and the first heatwave are the two weeks that decide your annual answering bill.
- Emergency call length. A no-heat call includes an address, a system description and an access arrangement, so it runs longer than a booking.
- Out-of-hours share, which for heating is heavily weighted to evenings and weekends.
- Whether the service can book straight into your dispatch calendar or just takes a message for someone to action in the morning.
- Maintenance-contract season, when planned service calls arrive alongside the emergencies.
Worked example
A six-van heating firm: 160 calls in a normal month, and a February cold snap producing 480.
Sized for the normal month on GreetKeeper Starter, February costs $49 + 280 × $0.45 = $175. You knew that number in October.
Sized for the normal month on PATLive's $759 plan, February's 1,440 minutes runs 940 minutes over at $1.79. That's $759 + $1,682 = $2,441.
On Rosie's $299 plan, February's 1,440 minutes exceeds the 2,000-minute allowance only if calls run longer than three minutes, and the rate past it isn't published.
Moving up to GreetKeeper Professional at $149 covers all 480 calls with no overage at all.
Size it wrong and you pay $126 extra on a published per-call rate, or nearly $1,700 on a per-minute one. That asymmetry is the thing to weigh if you run a heating business, not the monthly price on the front of the card.
Where our own price sits
$49 for 200 answered calls, $149 for 750, $349 for 2,000, with $0.45, $0.35 and $0.25 printed. A four-minute no-heat call at 11pm counts as one call.
Every call arrives as a transcript and a short summary, so the morning starts with what each caller actually said rather than a voicemail queue. You set which calls transfer straight to the on-call engineer.
| Plan | Monthly | Calls included | After that |
|---|---|---|---|
| StarterFor a single location taking calls one line at a time. | $49 | 200 | $0.45 per call |
| ProfessionalBooking, routing and transfers included, not an add-on. | $149 | 750 | $0.35 per call |
| ScaleFor busy phones and longer opening hours. | $349 | 2,000 | $0.25 per call |
Before you act on any of this
Every competitor figure on this page was read on that vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Prices change. Check before you buy.
Questions people ask
How should a seasonal business size its plan?
Size against your busy month rather than your average one whenever the overage rate is unpublished. Where it is published, size against the average and work out your spike in advance. On our rates that spike month above costs $175 rather than $49, which you can plan around.
Is per-call better than per-minute for HVAC?
Usually, because your emergency calls run long. A no-heat call with an address and a system description takes four or five minutes, and per-minute plans charge you for every one. Goodcall's unique-caller model also beats a minute meter for you here.
What does a missed evening call cost a heating company?
You know your own job value better than we do, and we won't quote you a figure we can't source. What we'd point you at is the behavior: someone with no heat rings the next number on their list rather than leaving you a message.
Can it book into a dispatch calendar?
You get booking on every one of our plans, and the integration matrix tells you what writes natively, what goes through Zapier and what doesn't connect at all. Find yours there before you compare prices.
Price your cold snap
Take your worst week last winter, multiply out, and check each vendor publishes a rate for it.