Third day over 100. You're in an attic at two in the afternoon with a meter in one hand and a flashlight in your teeth, and the phone in your pocket goes off. You can't take it. It rolls to voicemail, and the woman on the other end doesn't leave one, because she's hot and she's already dialing the next company on the Google results. You will never know that call happened.
That is usually what sends a contractor looking at AI phone answering, and it is usually how they end up on Avoca's site. Avoca is hard to miss right now. They announced more than $125 million at a billion dollar valuation this spring, they are all over the trade press, and their pitch covers most of what a front office does.
The question isn't whether Avoca is good software. It's whether it's aimed at a shop your size, and what else exists if it isn't. We make Thermoi, which is one of the alternatives, so read this with that in mind. Everything below about Avoca comes from what they publish themselves, and we'll be just as specific about what Thermoi does not do.
What Avoca is, in plain terms
Their homepage calls it "The AI Front Office for Service Businesses," with "Always-on agents that answer every call, fill every board, and keep your team focused on the work that matters." That is a wider scope than an answering service. The inbound product handles calls, texts and web chats around the clock and books jobs into your CRM. Around it sit separate modules: a scheduler, web chat, speed to lead, Google LSA, analytics, human in the loop escalation, outbound drip campaigns, and Coach, which scores and analyzes the calls your human CSRs take and flags missed opportunities. That last one is worth noting because it has nothing to do with the AI answering anything. It's software that grades your people.
They are not a small operation. Founded in 2022, Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, based in New York. In April 2026 they announced raising more than $125 million at a $1 billion valuation, with the Series B led by Meritech and General Catalyst and the Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. Their homepage claims "Trusted by 1,000+ Service Leaders" and displays a SOC 2 Certified badge. Their ServiceTitan Marketplace listing says 800+ operators. The two numbers they publish don't match. That's not a scandal, it's just a reminder to treat any vendor's customer count as marketing. We don't have one to publish yet, so you'll have to judge us on something else.
One practical thing: they don't publish pricing. No pricing page exists on their site, there's no figure on the product pages, and there's none on the marketplace listing either. Every button is a demo request. You will find monthly estimates for Avoca floating around on other blogs. Several of those blogs belong to companies that compete with them, and none of them are Avoca. Don't build a budget off that. Ask Avoca.
Who Avoca genuinely fits
Look at their integrations page and you'll see three CRMs featured: ServiceTitan, badged as a Certified App, plus Housecall Pro and FieldRoutes. ServiceTitan is the only one of the three carrying a Certified App badge. Their marketplace listing describes pulling current data via AdCap and booking jobs directly back into ServiceTitan.
Their published case studies point the same direction. Granite Comfort, a private equity backed multi brand platform, where Avoca's own write up says "Nine separate call centers became one." Homer Home Service, running several brands. Brody Pennell. Those are Avoca's claims about Avoca's customers, not independently verified numbers, but they tell you where the company's proof is concentrated: operators with real call center headcount, frequently more than one brand, and their one certified CRM integration is ServiceTitan.
To be fair to them, their homepage is explicit about selling across sizes. It says "whether you're running one location or one hundred" and describes running "from growing shops to multi-location operations." Nobody is going to hang up on a five truck shop. But emphasis matters when you're picking software, because a product gets shaped by the customers it's proud of. If you have a CSR team you want scored and coached, a customer database you want worked with capacity aware outbound campaigns, LSA spend to protect, and ServiceTitan underneath all of it, that is what Avoca is built around. A phone answering service will not replace it. If that describes your shop, book their demo. We mean that.
Why HVAC calls do not sort themselves
A plumbing call mostly diagnoses itself. Water is coming out of something, or it isn't. HVAC is messier. The same three words, "my AC stopped," could be a tripped breaker, a clogged condensate line that killed the unit on a float switch, a bad capacitor, or a compressor that is finished. One of those is a five minute phone fix. One is a Saturday overtime call. One is a Monday morning sales appointment. Whoever answers your phone has to sort that in about ninety seconds, while the customer is upset.
Then there's the clock. Your busiest hours are not your office hours. The no heat calls come in at nine at night in January, after the furnace has been short cycling all evening and finally gives up. The no cool calls come in at 5:30 in July when everybody gets home to an 88 degree house. A voicemail greeting at those hours is a lead you already paid for and then handed to whoever answers on the second ring.
Peak season makes it worse rather than better. On a heat wave week you'll take three times normal volume, your CSR is already on a call, the second line rolls over, and it happens on exactly the days when every customer is calling four companies at once.
Triage isn't the end of it either. Something has to decide whether this one is worth waking the tech on call. Err cautious every time and you burn a guy who has to be at a seven o'clock install. Err the other way and an elderly customer with no heat sits until Tuesday. Then layer in the membership customers who were promised priority, tenants calling about a landlord's building, home warranty callers who aren't really yours, and rooftop versus attic units that change what you send. That is the actual job. Not "answering the phone."
Where Thermoi fits, and where it doesn't
We built Thermoi for one trade. It answers your line 24/7, qualifies the call, books the appointment while the customer is still on the phone instead of promising a callback, and routes a genuine emergency to whoever is on call that night. Every call comes back as a full transcript, so when a booking looks wrong you can read what was actually said instead of reconstructing it from a callback log.
Getting on it is deliberately low commitment. Fifty dollars gets you a two week pilot on your real phone line, not a demo number in a sandbox. Monthly plans start at $299. We don't publish the tiers above that, because the right one depends on your call volume and that takes about fifteen minutes to work out on a call. No setup fee, no contract, month to month, 90 day money back guarantee. Most contractors are live in under 48 hours.
Here's the part that matters if you're weighing us against a company that just raised nine figures. Thermoi is early. We're pre revenue. We have no customer count to wave at you, no case study percentages, no logos, no awards. If a long public track record is what makes you comfortable signing, that is a legitimate reason to pick somebody else, and we'd rather you hear it from us now than feel misled in month two.
We also do less on purpose. Thermoi answers the phone. It doesn't run outbound drip campaigns against your customer list, it doesn't handle web chat, it doesn't score and coach your human CSRs, and it isn't a certified app in anyone's marketplace. If the whole front office needs rebuilding, we're the wrong tool and you should keep shopping. If the problem is the calls going to voicemail at eight at night in July, that's the entire thing we do.
How to actually choose
Start by counting, not guessing. Pull last month's missed calls out of your phone system instead of estimating them. If the number is small and the real pain is that your two CSRs book at wildly different rates, then coaching is your problem and Avoca sells coaching. If the number is fifty and half of them landed after six, you have a coverage problem, and coverage is the cheaper thing to fix.
Next, look at what runs the business. On ServiceTitan across multiple locations, Avoca has the deepest published path, including a certified marketplace app. On something smaller or homegrown, ask any vendor exactly how a booked job lands in your system and what happens when it can't. Make them walk you through the failure case, not the happy path. That one question sorts real integrations from logo grids fast.
Third, get the number early. A demo request with no published price means the conversation starts before you know what it costs. That's completely normal for software sold to larger operators and it isn't a knock on anybody, but it does mean you should ask in the first ten minutes and then compare it against what those missed calls are worth. One recovered no cool call in July covers a lot of software. Software you pay for and never really turn on covers nothing.
Last, be honest about how much unproven you can carry. Avoca has funding, a SOC 2 badge and named customers. We have a product built for one trade, a cheap trial and a guarantee. Those are two different kinds of safety, and only you know which one lets you sleep.
The cheapest way to settle it
Book both demos in the same week and ask each one the identical three questions. What happens at two in the morning when a caller says there's no heat and there's a newborn in the house. What happens when the AI can't understand the caller. What do I see afterward, exactly. Listen for whether you get a feature name or an actual description of what happens on the call.
Then test on your real line, in your real season, with your real customers, because a scripted demo call always sounds good. Ours runs fifty dollars for two weeks and cancels with an email. If you run both and Avoca turns out to be the better fit for your shop, that's a perfectly good outcome. The bad outcome is another July where the phone rings while you're in an attic and nobody picks it up.
Keep reading
The side by side version of this lives on the Thermoi vs Avoca comparison. For what an AI answering service actually does on each call, start with the HVAC answering service overview, and the pricing page has the $50 pilot and the ROI calculator on it.
Call patterns differ by market. There are breakdowns for Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, Miami, and Atlanta.
Questions people ask before they switch
How much does Avoca cost?
Avoca doesn't publish pricing. There is no pricing page on their site, no figure on the product pages, and none on their ServiceTitan Marketplace listing. Every call to action is a demo request. You will find monthly estimates quoted on third party blogs, several of which are published by companies that compete with Avoca, and none of those come from Avoca. The only reliable way to get the number is to ask them on the demo. For a point of comparison, Thermoi publishes a floor: plans start at $299 a month, with the right tier sized on a 15 minute call based on your volume.
Do I need ServiceTitan to use Avoca?
No. ServiceTitan is their only certified integration and clearly the deepest one, but their integrations page also features Housecall Pro and FieldRoutes, and their sitemap lists many more integration pages beyond those three. If your CRM isn't one of the three featured on that page, ask them specifically what the integration does, how a booked job gets written into your system, and what happens when the write fails.
Is Avoca too big for a small HVAC shop?
Their homepage says the opposite. It reads "whether you're running one location or one hundred" and describes serving "from growing shops to multi-location operations," so they will absolutely sell to a small shop. What's worth noticing is where their published proof sits. The case studies they showcase are multi brand and multi location operators consolidating call centers, and their certified integration is ServiceTitan. That tells you what the product is optimized around. It does not tell you they'll turn you away.
Can an AI actually tell a real HVAC emergency from a call that can wait?
That is the whole test, and you shouldn't take any vendor's word for it including ours. Thermoi is built for HVAC only, triages while the caller is still on the line, routes a genuine emergency to the tech on call, and books routine work without waking anybody up. Every call comes back as a full transcript so you can check the judgement calls yourself. Run it on your own line during a hot week and read them. That's why the pilot is $50 for two weeks on your real number.
What happens if I switch and it doesn't work out?
With Thermoi there is not much to unwind. No setup fee, no contract, month to month, 90 day money back guarantee, and most contractors are live in under 48 hours, so a bad fit costs you a couple of days and a call forwarding change. Avoca doesn't publish contract terms anywhere public. Their ServiceTitan Marketplace listing says most customers are live within two weeks of onboarding, which is their own claim, so ask directly about term length, cancellation and what onboarding actually requires from your staff.