AI support agent · Comparison
A 24/7 chat agent on your own website that answers your customers from facts you give it, and hands off to a real person the moment it isn't sure.
$200/month · answers only from facts you write · escalates anything else · cancel anytime
An outside company whose staff answer your phone under your business name, usually charging per minute or per call. They take a message, collect contact details, and pass it along — some also book appointments against a calendar you share with them.
A real person answers, which matters enormously for a distressed caller. They handle a phone line, which a website widget structurally cannot, and a good service can be trained on scripts specific to your business. For businesses whose inbound is overwhelmingly phone-based, this is the right tool and it isn't close.
It answers the phone, and a growing share of after-hours enquiries never involve a phone call — someone fills in a contact form or messages the website at 10pm instead of dialling. Per-minute billing also means the cost scales with volume, and message-taking is not the same as answering: a caller who wanted to know whether you cover their area still waits until morning to find out.
Fieldsta covers the channel an answering service doesn't: the website. It answers the question itself — service area, hours, what you do and don't handle — from facts you wrote, at a flat monthly price regardless of volume, and hands anything sensitive to you rather than guessing. Plenty of businesses sensibly run both: the service takes calls, this takes the messages that were never going to be calls.
Before deciding anything: run the free check. It reads one public page of your site the way a customer would and tells you what they can actually see — how many ways they can reach you, and what happens if they land there at 9pm. No signup, and the result shows in full.
If your after-hours enquiries all arrive by phone, you may not need it. The gap worth checking is your website: form fills and chat messages that arrive overnight aren't reaching the answering service at all, because they were never phone calls.
It's a flat monthly price rather than per-minute or per-call, so the comparison depends entirely on your volume. We're not going to claim a saving without knowing what you currently pay or how many calls you take.
It does more than take one — it answers what it can from your facts first, then captures the details and contact information for anything it shouldn't answer, and notifies you with the full conversation rather than a summary.