Sixteen questions, honest answers.

A one-hour kickoff call and an afternoon of internal review. We map your form, ingest a tone sample, connect your calendar, and stage replies for your approval.

Most clients are live within 48 hours of signing. The longest part is the first 72 hours, where you preview drafts before any reply ships, so you can adjust the voice before it goes to a real customer.

No. We connect to the channels you already have. Web form by adding our endpoint as a copy-recipient. SMS by porting forwarding to a Twilio line we manage. Email by adding us as a delegate or by forwarding overnight messages to our intake address.

There is no app for your team to install, no dashboard your front desk has to learn, and no widget on your website that visitors can see.

Tell us, we re-wire it. Calendar moves between Calendly, Cal.com, and Google Calendar are a fifteen-minute change on our side. CRM swaps depend on the new CRM, but every supported integration is a flip of a config flag for us. None of it is your work.

Yours. During onboarding we ingest a tone sample, usually the last 50 to 100 emails or texts you sent customers. The agent reads that for cadence, vocabulary, level of formality, and the small tics every business has, like saying "shoot us a" instead of "send a".

If your front desk says "y'all" you will see "y'all". If your firm says "kindly", that is what comes out. We do not paste a generic friendly-receptionist persona on top of you.

No, by default. The reply does not introduce itself as a bot, does not use widget copy, and does not advertise the technology. The line we draw: helpful and quick, never deceptive. If a customer asks directly whether they are talking to a person, the agent answers honestly.

If you want it the other way, we can mark every reply as "Sent by AfterHours, our intake assistant" in the signature. About one in six clients picks that, the rest prefer it invisible.

Owners override any reply by responding to the morning brief. The agent learns from corrections within a day. We also stage anything ambiguous as a draft instead of sending blind, so you decide what counts as a real lead in your business.

For high-stakes categories, like attorney-client privilege questions or quoting an exact price, we route to draft-only by default. The agent never improvises on those, it surfaces them for you to handle in the morning.

Yes, for the first 72 hours by default and indefinitely if you want it. We call this draft mode. Replies sit in a queue, you approve or edit, then they ship. Most owners flip to live mode for low-risk categories after a week and keep draft mode on for the categories where mistakes are expensive.

We store the inbound message, the reply, and the lead status in a Postgres row, encrypted at rest, retained 90 days by default. You can request a shorter window in your contract. We do not train any model on your customer data and we do not share it with anyone outside our infrastructure.

It does not, and we do not pitch it that way. AfterHours runs the night shift and the weekend shift. Your daytime receptionist still owns business hours. The handoff happens at 8am, when whatever was booked overnight shows up on the morning brief, and your front desk takes the day from there.

Some clients with no daytime receptionist do use AfterHours all the way around the clock, but that is a separate Concierge configuration.

Phase 2. Today we take the inbound voicemail or the call transcript and reply by SMS or email within sixty seconds. Real-time voice answering ships in a later release and will not be a free upgrade for the first cohort.

English and Spanish, today. The agent matches the language of the inbound. If you operate in a market where bilingual intake actually closes the deal, like immigration law or San Antonio HVAC, this is one of the bigger reasons clients keep us. Other languages on request, with a one-week setup window.

Cancel anytime, no minimum term. Our incentive is to keep the brief reading well enough that you do not want to. The first 60 days for the case-study cohort require a published case study at the end, but you can still cancel and walk away from the case study with no penalty.

Each tier includes a monthly inbound count. Beyond that, overage is a fixed dollar amount per inbound, never a per-token or per-minute meter. On Pro, that is one dollar per extra inbound. We will tell you when you cross 80 percent of your bucket, so a busy month is never a surprise on the invoice.

Yes. Pay for ten months upfront, get the next two free. We pass that through cleanly because annual reduces our churn risk. The discount only applies after the first 60 days, so we are not locking anyone in before they have read at least eight weeks of morning briefs.

You keep your inbox, your forwarding rules, your calendar, and the last 90 days of intake records as a CSV export. We do not own your customer relationships and we do not lock anything behind us. The agent is configured per client in a way that can be handed off, so worst case you switch to a different vendor or hire someone in-house, and the tone profile we built moves with you.

No. You read the morning brief, which is one paragraph per lead. The full transcript of every reply is in a daily archive you can pull up if you want, but most owners stop opening it after week two. The brief is the surface, the archive is the receipt.

It cannot. We connect to your live calendar through the same integration your customer-facing scheduler uses, so the agent only ever offers slots that are actually open at the moment of the reply. If two leads happen to grab overlapping slots within seconds of each other, the second one falls back to the next available window.