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Every roundup of AI answering services for HVAC, plumbing and electrical companies ranks the same two things: price per minute and how human the voice sounds. Neither decides whether the tool works for you. What decides it is the object that lands in your field service software when the call ends, and the honest answers run from a dispatched job with an arrival window down to a note on a customer record.
The short answer. If you run ServiceTitan, buy a trades native vendor with a Certified App badge, because it books onto your real dispatch board with the correct business unit and job type. If you run Jobber or Housecall Pro, the first party receptionist each of them sells is the shortest path to a booked job, and Jobber publishes the clearest price in the category. If you want the agent to live in the same system as your marketing and your follow up, GoHighLevel is the only general purpose voice platform we found with a native, non Zapier route into Housecall Pro jobs. The cheap per minute options are mostly the ones that are blind to your board, and the vendors that do write a job either bundle minutes into a monthly fee or publish no price at all.
The question that actually separates these tools
A booked call is not one outcome. In the vendors' own documentation it is at least five, worth ranking because the gap between the top and the bottom is the entire value of the purchase.
- A real job on the dispatch board, carrying a job type. Sameday goes furthest and is the only one of the three to document an arrival window, stating it plainly as "FSM write-back" alongside job duration rules and skill matching. ServiceTitan's own AI Voice Agent creates a tagged job and uses Adaptive Capacity to set the business unit and job type, though its documentation never uses the words arrival window. Avoca's listing describes jobs appearing on the board with customer, address, service type and call notes.
- A job or an estimate on a calendar, which is Housecall Pro's CSR AI, with an option to leave the job unscheduled.
- A job, an assessment, a request or a task, depending on the call, which is Jobber's model. Its dashboard tags those four outcomes as Job scheduled, Assessment scheduled, Request created and Took a message.
- A calendar appointment only, with no object in the field service system. Rosie sits here, and only from its middle tier up.
- A customer note, or nothing structured at all. Podium's published integrations into ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro write a note after a call, and its real booking happens inside Podium's own field service product, which replaces yours rather than connecting to it. Goodcall books appointments but documents no job creation in any field service system, and Slang.ai is restaurant software.
Only the top of that list removes work from your office. The rest moves it.
The Zapier answer collapses on Housecall Pro
The standard advice is that the integration does not matter, because any voice platform can be wired to any field service system with Zapier. That is true for two of the three systems and false for the third.
Zapier's ServiceTitan page publishes a Create Job action, with required fields for customer, location, business unit, job type, priority and start and end times. Zapier's Jobber page also publishes Create Job, with the documented caveat that it books against the client's first property.
Zapier's Housecall Pro page publishes exactly one action: Create Customer. Two triggers go out, New Completed Job and New Scheduled Job, and one action comes in, and it cannot book anything. So if you run Housecall Pro and a vendor says it connects through Zapier, it is offering to create a contact. Somebody in your office still opens the job.
Start a GoHighLevel trial if that is the gap you need to close, because its Housecall Pro app is the exception described below. Otherwise treat "we integrate with Zapier" as a statement about contacts, not about jobs.
Trades native vendors, and what they cost
Sameday publishes real prices, which almost nobody in this half of the market does: Launch starts at 449 dollars a month with 500 minutes, Scale at 789 with 1,000 minutes, Enterprise custom. Its integration list is the widest we found, naming ServiceTitan, Service Fusion, Jobber and FieldRoutes, and its scheduling page is explicit that jobs land on the real board rather than in a separate inbox to re key later.
Avoca is a ServiceTitan Certified App whose marketplace listing says it books jobs directly back into ServiceTitan through the API. It publishes no price, and every Avoca price you will find in a third party blog is a number Avoca does not publish, so we are not going to repeat one.
ServiceTitan's own AI Voice Agent requires The Essentials or The Works plus a phone integration, and its configuration document says the feature is in Early Access for specific accounts. ServiceTitan publishes the billing model but not the rate, and the model has an edge worth knowing before you sign: "All calls, regardless of their outcome or the caller's intent, are included in your bill." A wrong number is a billable call. Its own documentation also lists a gap: the agent cannot yet add call notes, summaries or transcripts to the booked job record.
What Jobber and Housecall Pro sell you directly
Jobber has the clearest pricing of any vendor here. Its AI Receptionist is included on the Plus plan with unlimited usage, or added to select plans for 29 dollars a month including 30 conversations, with 79 cents per conversation after that. The booked appointment carries an arrival time from your arrival window settings. One published behaviour deserves attention, because it is the difference between booking and dispatching: Receptionist books through your Online Booking settings, and Jobber documents there that if more than one team member is free in a slot the appointment is assigned randomly. You can shape that with per member availability, but it is not dispatch.
Housecall Pro's CSR AI books jobs and estimates onto the calendar and quotes the set price from your price book. It is a paid add on with no published price, and the help centre routes you to Contact Sales. Two contradictions in its own documentation are worth raising on the sales call: one overview page still calls booking "coming soon" while the rest of that page describes it as live, and the help centre says the AI disclosure cannot be turned off while the marketing FAQ says you choose.
General platforms are cheap, and mostly blind
The general purpose voice platforms are the only ones here that publish a real per minute rate, and at the bottom of the range they are far cheaper than a bundled trades plan. What most of them do not have is any route into your board.
Retell AI charges roughly 0.07 to 0.31 dollars a minute. Its integrations page has a Home Service Software category, ServiceTitan is the only entry in it, and Retell labels that entry an Unofficial Connector whose setup guide begins by logging in to Zapier. Vapi charges 0.05 dollars a minute for hosting and has four native external tools: Google Calendar, Google Sheets, Slack and GoHighLevel. ServiceTitan's logo does appear on Vapi's pricing page under "Trusted at enterprise scale", but that is a customer logo, not an integration. Bland AI runs 0.14 dollars a minute with no platform fee, 0.12 with a 299 dollar fee, or 0.11 with a 499 dollar fee, and its integrations page self reports 19 of 19 while naming no field service system. Its comparison table gates the Appointment Scheduling Node to Enterprise, so the cheap Bland plans do not book at all.
GoHighLevel breaks the pattern, in one place. Its Housecall Pro app is native rather than a Zapier recipe and its published action list includes Create a job and Create a job appointment, which is the only non Zapier path from a general purpose platform into a Housecall Pro job we could document anywhere. Plans are 97, 297 and 497 dollars a month, and they are sold as agency tiers, with the entry plan's headline feature being how many sub accounts it holds rather than anything a single contractor needs. Voice AI is billed separately, either on usage at a voice engine rate of 0.045 dollars a minute plus text to speech from 0.015 to 0.170 and tokens on top, or on a flat AI Employee add on at 50 dollars a month for 100 agent minutes or 97 unlimited per location. Phone charges apply either way.
Where GoHighLevel loses, and we would rather you knew now. Its Jobber integration syncs contacts only: name, email, phone, address, lead source, a Jobber client URL, a created date and tags, and it explicitly does not sync notes or attachments, let alone jobs. There is no native ServiceTitan app at all, only a Zapier article last modified in 2023. And by the test this article sets two sections down, the Housecall Pro action list above is published on GoHighLevel's product changelog rather than in its developer documentation, so hold it to the same standard and ask to see it working before you buy on it. And its own Voice AI overview page contradicts itself, the body describing booking during a call while the FAQ on that page says direct scheduling requires a calendar integration through workflows. If you run ServiceTitan, a Certified App vendor is the better buy and we would say so on a call. Look at GoHighLevel if you run Housecall Pro, or want the receptionist and the follow up in one system.
Two integration lists that do not match the docs
Read the documentation, not the logo wall. Synthflow's marketing integrations page carries a Vertical CRM category naming Jobber, Housecall Pro and ServiceTitan. Its own documentation index lists three CRMs, and they are GoHighLevel, Salesforce and HubSpot: none of the three field service systems appears in the docs at all, and none has a setup guide or a field mapping anywhere we could find. Its pricing page says enterprise contracts start at 30,000 dollars a year and publishes no per minute rate.
That is the cheapest due diligence available to you and it takes ten minutes: open the vendor's developer documentation, not its integrations marketing page, and search it for the name of your field service system. If the name is not in the docs, treat it as a logo until someone shows you the field mapping. Apply that to us too, and to the GoHighLevel action list above.
The bottom line
The per minute price is the least important number in this decision, because the expensive part of a missed call was never the minute. Pick on the write back. Buy a Certified App on ServiceTitan; start with the first party receptionist on Jobber or Housecall Pro, since there is no connector in between it and your scheduler, while pressing Housecall Pro on whether booking is live; and take GoHighLevel if you want the answering agent and the follow up in one place, with the caveats above.
Two questions settle most demos. Ask how a wrong number is billed, because ServiceTitan bills every call regardless of outcome and says so in writing. And ask who gets assigned, because booking is not dispatching: Jobber's online booking assigns randomly when more than one tech is free unless you configure availability to prevent it. Settle the disclosure rules before launch too, since inbound and outbound AI calls sit under different ones: our notes on TCPA compliant AI calling cover the outbound half.
If you would rather not evaluate a dozen vendors, we build and run this for home service companies, including the part every vendor leaves to you, which is the wiring between the agent and the board. See AI calling for home services, or how we approach AI automation more broadly.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends entirely on the field service software you already run, because that is what decides whether a call becomes a job or a message. On ServiceTitan, a Certified App vendor such as Avoca or a trades native platform such as Sameday books onto the real dispatch board. On Jobber or Housecall Pro, the first party receptionist each vendor sells is the shortest path to a booked job. If you want the answering agent in the same system as your marketing and follow up, GoHighLevel has the deepest documented write back of the general purpose platforms, though only into Housecall Pro, and that action list is published on its changelog rather than in its developer docs.
Published prices vary by more than an order of magnitude and many vendors publish none. Jobber charges 29 dollars a month including 30 conversations and 79 cents per conversation after that, or includes it on the Plus plan. Rosie runs 49 to 299 dollars a month by minute allowance. Goodcall runs 79 to 249 dollars a month per agent, priced by unique customers rather than minutes. Sameday starts at 449 dollars a month for 500 minutes. Avoca, ServiceTitan's AI Voice Agent, Housecall Pro's CSR AI and Podium publish no price at all. Synthflow states that enterprise contracts start at 30,000 dollars a year.
For ServiceTitan and Jobber, yes, because Zapier publishes a Create Job action for both. For Housecall Pro, no. Zapier's Housecall Pro page publishes two triggers and exactly one action, Create Customer, so a Zapier based integration can create a contact but cannot book a job. If you run Housecall Pro, a native integration is not a nice to have, it is the difference between a booked job and a name in a list.
Some do and most do not. Sameday documents arrival windows, job duration rules and skill matching explicitly. ServiceTitan's AI Voice Agent creates a tagged job and assigns the business unit and job type through Adaptive Capacity. Jobber creates an appointment with an arrival time from your arrival window settings, but its online booking assigns the technician randomly when more than one is free unless you shape availability. Rosie books a calendar appointment with no job record, and Podium's ServiceTitan and Housecall Pro integrations write a customer note rather than a job.
Start with the first party product if you run Jobber or Housecall Pro, because it is talking to the scheduler directly and there is no connector to break, though it is worth asking Housecall Pro to confirm booking is live, since one of its own overview pages still calls it coming soon. Look at a third party when you need something the first party product does not do, such as handling calls for several brands or locations, quoting outside the price book, or routing emergencies to an on call technician the way Avoca describes. On ServiceTitan the calculation shifts, because its own agent is still in Early Access for specific accounts while several Certified App vendors are generally available.
Six questions. What object appears in my field service system after a booked call, a job or a lead. Is that integration in your developer documentation or only on your marketing page. What happens to a call the agent cannot book. How is a wrong number billed. Who gets assigned to the job, and on what rule. And what does the agent disclose to the caller, and can I change it. The answers to those six separate the vendors far better than a per minute rate does.