AfterHours is an AI night desk built for plumbing shops, HVAC companies, and electricians. We answer the after-hours form in your tone, qualify the urgency, book the morning visit, and email you a brief at 7am. The next-door shop has been winning the midnight call for years. Your turn.
The trades are the highest-urgency vertical we serve. A leak does not wait until tomorrow. A furnace at 38 degrees does not wait until tomorrow. Whoever picks up the call wins the job, and a 9am callback rarely picks up the call.
The form fires, the auto-confirmation goes out, the dispatch line is closed. By 7am the customer has already called the next plumber on the search results. Your shop is still asleep. You find out at 9am that you missed a $1,400 same-day job.
Even when somebody is technically on call, the reply is a deflection, not a booking. "Call back in the morning" is a polite way to send the customer to a competitor. The lead does not respond to the morning callback because they already booked elsewhere.
Tankless installs, sewer scopes, water heater swaps. The non-urgent quote requests pile up on Saturday and Sunday and get triaged Monday at noon. Half are gone by then. The other half are annoyed enough to ask you to sharpen the price.
The form fires, AfterHours mirrors it, the agent reads "water on the floor" as an active leak. Triage is set to high urgency. The agent texts back within 38 seconds with the after-hours emergency line, an offer of an 8:00 am next-day slot, and a request to shut the supply valve under the sink.
Triage is low urgency. The agent does not wake the on-call tech. It replies politely, captures address and access window, offers two non-emergency slots Monday and Tuesday. The booking lands on the calendar. Owner sees one line in the morning brief.
Project, not emergency. The agent gathers fuel type, household size, and whether the existing tank is gas or electric, all in two follow-up turns. It books a Thursday morning estimate window. The owner gets the lead in the brief with a tag of "warm, scheduled."
This is the high-stakes HVAC call. The agent reads "two kids asleep" and "52 degrees" as a top-priority dispatch. It replies in under a minute with practical first-aid steps, an offer of a 7:00 am same-day visit, and the after-hours emergency line if the temperature drops below 45.
Electrical, not plumbing. The agent recognizes the safety angle and replies with measured calm, no clinical advice on the panel itself. It books a Saturday morning emergency-rate slot and flags the lead as urgent in the brief. No pricing quoted in the reply, the agent knows panel work is consult-only at this shop.
The average plumbing service ticket in our cohort runs $420. A water heater swap runs $1,800 to $2,400. A burst-pipe emergency dispatch is $600 minimum, often double. One missed midnight call is one missed ticket, every week.
If the average shop in our pilot fields five overnight inquiries a week and the conversion lift from a sub-60-second reply is roughly 28 percentage points (HBR data plus our own measurements), the recovered revenue lands around $2,350 a month. AfterHours costs $300 to $700 a month flat. The math is rarely close. The breakdown on the right shows the inputs.
We are not selling you a chatbot widget. We are selling you the night shift at the front desk, the part you cannot afford to staff in-house. Three plumbing shops are in our case-study cohort right now and we have room for a few more.
Numbers from pilot shops. Your mileage varies. The promise is the lift, not the exact figure.
We were missing roughly two same-day jobs a week because we replied at 8 in the morning. The brief at 7 changed how I run the day. By the time I am drinking coffee, I already know who to call first.
Three tiers. We bill you, you do not pay per minute. Pricing scales with overnight volume, not with our compute bill.
Volume tends to land in the 5 to 15 inquiries per night band, which is squarely in the Pro tier. Big shops with multi-truck dispatch sometimes need Concierge for human-in-the-loop triage. Small shops with under 3 a night are usually fine on Starter.
See full pricingThe case-study cohort is open this week. $400 one-time setup, no monthly fee for 60 days, in exchange for a published case study at the end. Cancel anytime.
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