A flat fee AI receptionist is a simple promise: one number on your credit card every month, and every call your shop gets — 2 PM Tuesday or 3 AM Sunday — gets answered, triaged, and booked. But "flat fee" only means something if you know exactly what's inside the box. Vendors love the word "flat" right up until the overage line shows up on page three of the invoice.
This page itemizes what a flat monthly fee buys with Ava, Best Choice Garage Doors' 24/7 AI employee, line by line — what's included, what's deliberately not included, and how to read any flat-fee offer before you sign it.
The offer is $97 for the first month, then $297/month flat. Unlimited calls. No contract. Cancel anytime.
For that flat monthly number, your shop gets:
That's the whole bill. There's no seat count, no minute bundle, no "premium tier" for nights and weekends.
Let's slow down and look at each line, because each one replaces a cost you're already paying — in money, time, or lost jobs.
This is the core of the fee. A live answering service that covers true 24/7 usually charges a base rate plus per-minute time, and after-hours minutes often cost more than daytime ones. An owner answering their own phone pays in evenings, weekends, and jobs interrupted.
With Ava, the 7 AM broken-spring call, the noon rush when you're under a door, and the 11 PM "my car is trapped" call all get the same answer on the first ring. The fee doesn't care what time it is.
Garage door calls are not all equal. A caller whose car is trapped and who has to be at work in 40 minutes is a different call from someone asking about a new opener quote next month. Ava is built around that difference: emergency calls get flagged and surfaced to you immediately, routine calls get booked into normal service windows.
You set the rules for what counts as urgent in your shop. The flat fee includes that triage logic — it's not an add-on.
Every owner has taken a call on a job site, scribbled half a name and a maybe-address on a glove, and lost the job to bad handwriting. Ava captures name, phone number, address, and issue on every call — no shortcuts when it's busy, no forgotten field at midnight.
That alone is worth real money. A callback list with complete, correct details converts. A list of half-numbers doesn't.
There's a big difference between an answering service that "takes a message" and one that ends the call with a booked service window. Messages create a second task: call back, hope they answer, hope they haven't already booked the next company on the list. Ava books the window while the caller is still on the phone, inside the availability rules you set.
The fee includes that booking behavior. It's the difference between "we answered" and "we booked" — and the booked call is the one that pays.
After every call, you get a summary by text and email: who called, from where, about what, and what was booked. You stay in the loop from the truck, the job site, or your kitchen table without listening to a single voicemail.
Ava works with the number you already market — the one on your Google Business Profile, your trucks, your yard signs, your fridge magnets. Call forwarding sends the call to Ava when you can't pick up (or for every call, if you prefer). Nothing your customers see changes. That's included in the flat fee, and setup is done for you.
There's no implementation project. No weeks of onboarding calls, no script you have to write from scratch, no IT guy. Setup is handled for you and you're live in under 24 hours. The first month at $97 exists so you can watch it work before the full rate kicks in.
An unlimited calls AI receptionist means exactly what it says: the monthly fee does not move with call volume. Ten calls a month or four hundred, the number is $297.
That matters more in this trade than most. Garage door call volume is spiky:
On a metered plan, your best months for revenue are also your most expensive months for answering. Per-minute pricing punishes growth. A flat fee flips that: the surge costs nothing extra, so the margin on every extra booked job is yours. Unlimited calls with no contract shifts the risk to the vendor — if the service stops earning its fee, you stop paying it.
Honest section. A flat-fee AI receptionist is not everything. Know the edges before you buy — with Ava or anyone else.
Any flat-fee plan has exclusions somewhere. The ones that matter are the ones a vendor doesn't tell you about — overage triggers, "after-hours premiums," setup fees billed later. Worth a read before you sign anything: what's usually not included in flat-fee plans.
Here's how a 297 a month answering service stacks up against the usual options. These are category comparisons, not shots at any company.
| Option | Typical cost shape | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Ava flat-fee AI | $97 first month, then $297/mo flat | 24/7 answer, triage, booking, summaries, unlimited calls, no contract |
| Live answering service | Base fee + per-minute/per-call, after-hours premiums | A human message-taker, often without booking, bill grows with volume |
| Hiring a CSR | Full monthly payroll, taxes, training, coverage gaps | One person, business hours only, sick days and turnover included |
| Your own cell phone | "Free" | Missed calls on every job, evenings spent on the phone, lost after-hours work |
| Voicemail | Free | Most urgent callers hang up and dial the next company |
The per-minute services deserve a closer look, because their advertised base rates rarely survive contact with a real month. The fees contractors miss on live answering bills — overage, after-hours multipliers, holiday rates — are exactly what a flat fee eliminates.
Say your shop gets 120 inbound calls in a month — light for spring, normal for a steady two-truck operation. The average call runs about 4 minutes.
On a per-minute live service (using a commonly seen planning figure of around $1.50/minute on top of a modest base — check any real quote against this):
On the flat fee: $297. Same 120 calls answered, plus booking and summaries. If the next month storms push you to 300 calls, the live service bill roughly doubles; the flat fee stays $297.
Your numbers will differ — pull your actual call count from your phone logs and rerun it. The shape of the answer almost never changes once volume passes a few dozen calls a month: flat wins, and the gap grows with volume.
Whether it's Ava or anyone else, run every "flat fee" offer through these questions:
If a vendor gets slippery on any of these, that tells you what the invoice will look like later.
A flat fee AI receptionist at $297 a month buys three things: every call answered around the clock, every caller captured and booked instead of messaged, and a monthly number that never moves. What it doesn't buy is also clear — it doesn't do the work, set your prices, or run outbound sales. It's inbound answering done completely, at a cost you can write into the budget in ink.
The risk sits with the vendor, where it belongs: no contract, cancel anytime, and your money back if the first 10 leads don't show up in 30 days. The $97 first month exists so you can judge the thing by what it catches, not by what a sales page claims.
If you want to hear what your customers will hear before you spend anything, the demo is a live phone call — not a video.
Call the live demo and have Ava call you now — hear exactly what your customers will hear when they call your shop.