You picked up this article because you missed a call. Maybe several. Maybe a lockout at 10 p.m. that went to a competitor.
Locksmith work doesn't allow for "I'll call you back in an hour" — when someone is locked out, they're calling three numbers and going with whoever answers first. So the question isn't whether you need an answering service. It's how much it should cost.
Here's an honest breakdown.
Pricing falls into roughly three buckets, depending on what you actually want done with the call.
$30–$80/month: call forwarding with voicemail-to-text. This is the cheapest tier. A virtual receptionist software takes the call, plays a greeting, and emails or texts you a transcript. It does not book jobs. It does not triage. The customer hears a robot voicemail and usually hangs up. If your goal is "don't miss what the call said," this works. If your goal is "don't lose the job," it doesn't.
$200–$600/month: human call center, per-minute or per-call billing. A live agent in a call center somewhere answers your phone. They take a message and call you. Sometimes they book into a shared calendar if you've set one up. Costs scale with call volume — at $1.50/minute, a busy night during a freeze event can run you $200 in one day. They're not locksmiths, so they often can't answer "do you rekey Schlage or only replace?"
$80–$200/month: AI answering service. The newest tier. AI answers in your business's voice, knows your service area and rates, books directly into your calendar, and transfers anything urgent to you. Cost is flat, not per-minute, so call volume doesn't blow up the bill. Vallo sits here — designed specifically for trade-style businesses including locksmiths.
Average locksmith ticket sizes, roughly:
One captured house lockout — one — covers a month of Vallo or two months of a call center. Two captured lockouts covers the whole quarter.
The expensive option isn't the answering service. The expensive option is the missed call.
If you're shopping the $30/month tier: Be honest with yourself. This is a backup for when you're on a job and forgot to forward your phone — it's not a system. If you're a one-person shop doing 5 calls a week, fine. If you're missing real money, skip ahead.
If you're shopping the human call center tier: Ask about minimums, per-minute rates, and what they actually do with a lockout call. Most will take a message — make sure that's not your only outcome. Ask if they can book directly into Housecall Pro or whatever you use.
If you're shopping the AI tier: Ask whether it triages locksmith call types correctly (lockout vs. rekey vs. quote), whether it can transfer to you when it should, and how long setup actually takes. The good ones go live the same day.
Pricing isn't the deciding factor — coverage and conversion are. Bare-bones forwarding is cheap because it doesn't book jobs. A human call center is moderate because it takes messages but charges by the minute. AI answering services like Vallo sit in the middle on price and do the most: they answer, triage, book, and transfer.
If you're missing one lockout a week, you're leaving roughly $700–$1,000 a month on the table. Any tier above "voicemail" pays for itself.
If you want to see how Vallo handles a lockout call in your business's voice, start a free trial. Setup takes about five minutes.
