A homeowner fills in your form at 9:41 pm. Then the next contractor's.
Nobody fills in one form. They open three sites, type the same paragraph into each, and the first useful answer sets the tone for the rest. Yours arrives when you check email in the morning, after a day on site, and by then the first useful answer came from someone else. Here is what the agent does with that form, in order.
- 9:41 pm
The form is submitted. Your form tool posts the submission to the agent the moment it lands. Nothing waits for the morning, and nobody has to notice an email in an inbox.
- Seconds later
It reads the lead. Before writing a word, it checks whether the person is already in your records, whether the address they gave is inside your service area, and what your price list and FAQ say about the job they described.
- Then
It scores the lead. Hot, warm, cold, or spam, with a number from 0 to 100, an urgency, and a list of what it still doesn't know. Hot means what you told us it means: a specific job, in your area, wanted soon. Spam gets no reply, no entry in your records, and no alert.
- Within minutes
The reply goes out. By email when they gave one, by text when a phone number is all you have. It thanks them by name, shows it understood the job, answers what your documents can answer, asks at most two of the questions you'd ask, and offers your booking link. An emergency is told to call your number right now instead.
- At the same time
You get the alert. For a hot or warm lead, a Slack message with the score, the service, the contact details, a short summary, what to do next, and whether the reply went out. A cold lead still gets its reply and its record, but your phone stays quiet.
- On reply
The thread continues. A text reply comes back to the agent, which answers from the same material. An email reply lands in your own inbox, because the reply-to address on every email is yours. From the second message on, the conversation is between you and the customer.
A sample lead, answered
A fictional remodeler, Ridgeback Remodeling, whose price sheet says bathroom remodels start at $9,800 and most land between $12,000 and $16,000. The figures below are that sheet's, and the review would block any that weren't.
Submitted on the website, 9:41 pm Tuesday
- Name
- Dana Whitfield
- dana.whitfield@mail.example
- Phone
- 555-0142
- Message
- We want to redo our hall bathroom: tub out, walk-in shower in, new vanity and tile. House is in Ashgrove. Hoping to start in the next few weeks. Rough idea of cost?
Email reply, minutes later
Subject: Your hall bathroom remodel
Hi Dana, thanks for getting in touch about the hall bathroom. A tub-to-shower conversion with a new vanity and tile is squarely what we do, and Ashgrove is inside our service area.
Our bathroom remodels start at $9,800, and most land between $12,000 and $16,000 depending on the tile and fixtures you choose. The exact figure comes from a free in-home estimate, which takes about an hour.
Two quick questions so the estimate is accurate: is the plumbing staying where it is, and which week would suit you for the visit? You can also pick a time directly at ridgebackremodeling.example/estimate.
Ridgeback Remodeling
Three to six sentences, one next step, signed by the business. Under it, not shown, the footer every email carries: the business name, its postal address, and an unsubscribe link. Dana's reply goes to the owner's own inbox.
The same lead, phone number only
Had the form carried no email, the reply is a text instead, and a text follows stricter rules: under 300 characters, the business named first, a plain note that it's automated, the opt-out line last.
What lands in your Slack
New hot lead
HOT lead (88/100) - Bathroom remodel: tub to walk-in shower, vanity, tile
Dana Whitfield dana.whitfield@mail.example 555-0142
Hall bath in Ashgrove, wants to start within a few weeks, asked for a rough cost. Quoted the starting price and the usual range from the price sheet. Still unknown: whether the plumbing moves, and a week for the visit.
Next: call Dana tomorrow morning to set the estimate visit before she books with someone else.
Reply sent via email.
The shape is the agent's own: tier and score, the service, the contact, a summary, the next step, and whether the reply went out. If it couldn't go out, the alert says so and asks you to contact them yourself. No Slack? The alert comes by email or by text to your cell instead.
Three things it gets mistaken for.
Speed to lead is a phrase marketing platforms use to sell a bundle. This is one agent with one job, run for you: it answers the form, scores the lead, records it where you keep records, and tells you who to call. The three nearest things it isn't:
It is not an auto-responder.
Every form tool can send "Thanks, we'll be in touch" for free, and that is all it should send. This reads what the person wrote, quotes from your price sheet, checks their town against your service area, and asks the two questions you'd ask on the phone. If a receipt is all you want, you already have one.
It is not a CRM, and not a marketing platform.
It writes into the system you already run: HubSpot directly, or anything that accepts a webhook. If you have neither, it keeps the record itself. Pipelines, dashboards, a dialer, and drip campaigns are what a marketing platform sells, and if you want those, buy the platform. A platform's workflow can fire a first message too, written once for everyone; it can't read the message and answer it.
It is not a follow-up sequence.
It sends one reply and answers what comes back. If the lead goes quiet, it goes quiet too. A three-touch cadence after a quote is good practice, and it's yours to run, by hand or in your CRM; the estimate follow-up guide below has the cadence and the templates.
What happens between the call and the first reply.
Most of this is on our side. Your side is the paperwork link, the intake, and one webhook in your form tool. Because the reply goes by email unless you add texting, there is no carrier to wait on; the pace is set by how quickly the intake comes back and how many rehearsal rounds it takes.
- 01
One link, three signatures' worth of paperwork. After the call we create your account and send one onboarding link: the terms, the service agreement (your typed name signs it), billing, and the first month's invoice. Nothing is set up or sent until that invoice is paid.
- 02
The intake, plus what makes a lead hot. The link ends in a short intake: website, postal address (it goes at the foot of every email the agent sends, as the law requires), hours, time zone, service area, services, pricing notes, booking link, how you greet people, what you never promise, and who gets the urgent ones. Price lists and FAQs can be uploaded. On the call you tell us what makes a lead worth a phone call for you and the two or three questions you always ask; those become its settings.
- 03
Email first; a text line only if you want one. Email is the required channel. For the reply to come from your own address, your domain needs three DNS records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), which we'll spell out for whoever manages your site; if nobody can touch DNS, the agent sends from a domain we run and every reply still comes to your inbox. Texting is optional: a toll-free number we provide, with a carrier verification that typically takes about three business days. Email replies don't wait for it.
- 04
Point your form at it. Your form tool gets a webhook address with its own secret. Tally, Typeform, Gravity Forms, and HubSpot forms have a webhook action built in; anything else goes through Zapier, Make, or n8n. The form sends a name, an email, a phone, and the message. That is the one step on your side, and we'll do it with you on a screen share if you'd rather.
- 05
Train, rehearse, then a real test. The console reads your site and your files and suggests the profile, the FAQ, and the review rules; we approve each suggestion by hand. Then it answers a set of example leads, and you read the drafts and tell us which don't sound like you. Last, a real test lead from our own phone and email, so we both see the reply and the alert arrive.
- 06
Live, with a copy to us. For the first fortnight the agent sends at full speed and a person on our side gets a copy of every reply as it goes out, with the reviewer's verdict. If you'd rather nothing goes out unseen, there's a slower mode where each reply waits for approval; it's there for regulated businesses, and we'll tell you why we don't recommend it for a lead.
Once it's live you get a sign-in to a portal that reads on a phone: every lead, what was sent, which ones were passed to you, and the month's usage. Conversation records are dropped after 90 days. If you add texting and later leave, the number ports out with you.
A wrong quote never reaches a lead.
One model writes the reply; a second reads it against your configuration and the passages it drew on, and objects to any price, hour, link, or promise it can't find there. Two fixed rules sit on top for this agent: a price or fee in the reply has to appear in your settings or your documents, and a text has to stay under 300 characters. A draft that fails gets one rewrite. If the rewrite fails too, the lead gets nothing from the agent; you get the draft and the reviewer's objections, and the lead is saved with a note that the reply was held. Then you make the call, and the fix becomes a house rule.
Reply only
It can only message a person who submitted your form. There is no list to load and no way to point it at one. The consent line on your form is yours to carry, and the intake asks you to attest to it before the first reply goes out.
Texts keep office hours
A text goes out only between 8 am and 8 pm in your time zone. A lead with a phone number and no email who arrives at 11 pm waits for 8 am, and you hear about them at once, in case it can't wait. A lead with an email is answered by email at 11 pm.
Stop means stop
Every email ends with your business name, your postal address, and an unsubscribe link; every first text ends with the opt-out line. A person who uses either goes on a do-not-contact list that every agent of yours checks before every send, text or email.
No advertising
Promotional phrases are blocked in a text by a fixed list, not by asking the model. A reply to a lead stays a reply. The agent also never asks for card numbers, passwords, or ID numbers, and treats anything the lead wrote as information rather than instructions.
Those four are enforced in code, on every send. The legal footing is that a person who asked you a question through your own form may get an answer. Email replies carry the sender identification and unsubscribe mechanism that the FTC's CAN-SPAM guide describes, and texts follow the 8 pm cutoff that the strictest states set. What your form should say about texting, and what your state requires, is a question for your own counsel; this page describes the controls, it doesn't advise on them.
$149 a month, no setup fee, month to month.
$149 a month, plus AI usage and phone line costs, typically $20–40 a month. With email only, the phone-line part doesn't apply: usage is the AI cost of the leads it answers, invoiced at the start of the next month. The first month is the first invoice, paid before anything is built, and it covers the training, the rehearsal, the test lead, and the fortnight a person reads every reply. The terms, as printed:
- Month to month, cancel any time
- 30-day cancel for any reason
- No setup fee
- If you add text messaging, the number ports out with you
- Conversation records kept 90 days
Two agents on one business don't need two setups. If the same business later adds missed-call text back for the calls that ring out, it goes on the same account, the same number, and the same monthly invoice, at that agent's own monthly price.
Open last month's form submissions before you book.
Next to each one, write how long it took you to answer: same hour, same day, next day, never. Then mark the ones that turned into a visit. If the same-hour column is short and the next-day column has a real job in it, you have your number. One job a month worth more than $149 to you covers the fee; if you can't find one in last month's list, don't buy this, and I'll say so on the call too.
A fit if…
- Your leads arrive through a form on your site, and you answer them in a batch at night or the next morning
- The first questions are always the same: what's the job, where is it, how soon, what does it roughly cost
- Those answers exist in writing, in a price sheet or on your site
- You'd rather be told which three leads to call first than read all twenty
Skip it if…
- Fewer than a handful of form leads a month. There isn't enough to answer.
- Your leads call instead of typing. That's the missed-call agent, not this one.
- You want a sequence of nudges after the first reply. It sends one and answers what comes back.
- Your form can't send a webhook and you don't want Zapier or Make in the middle. Without that connection there is nothing to trigger it.
This agent went on sale in October 2026, and nobody has reviewed it yet, so there is no testimonial here to weigh. What you can weigh is the mechanism: the sample above, the rehearsal you read before it goes live, and the second model on every reply. If the questions come through a chat window on your site rather than a form, the website chat agent answers those while the visitor is still reading.
The first reply is the part worth automating; what comes after it is judgment. The cadence for chasing a quote, with seven templates, is in how to follow up on an estimate, and the studies behind the speed-to-lead numbers people quote are traced in lead response time statistics.
