Illustration. The text-back is composed and held in your outbox today — it leaves, and replies come back, once your carrier registration clears.
Your phone is buzzing in the cupholder. You are twenty feet up.
It rings four times and stops. You will see the missed call at 4:30 when you climb down, and by then it is a name with no context and a decision about whether calling back at dinner time makes you look desperate.
She did not wait. At 2:09 she called the next company on the map. They picked up. You will never know she existed, which is the expensive part — you cannot fix a leak you cannot see.
CallMitt is built to close that window. The moment the call is logged, the text-back for that exact hour of the week is composed from your template and queued to go out from your own texting number, a local number in your area code registered to your business, asking what she needs done and when. The gateway is the last piece — until your carrier registration clears you can read every queued message in the dashboard.
One missed call, start to finish
One tap starts it. Everything after that runs itself.
The call gets logged
One tap in the dashboard, or from the missed-call list on your phone. Automatic detection from your carrier is the next piece of plumbing; today a human logs it and everything after that is automatic.
The right text is composed instantly
From your own texting number, in your words, opening with your business name — and the version that matches this exact hour, weekend or holiday. Quiet hours, your suppression list and any opt-out are checked before it queues.
The thread lands in your inbox
One place, on your phone and on the office computer, stitched to any website quote from the same number. Nobody has to forward a screenshot.
The dashboard keeps the tally
Calls logged, messages queued or blocked and why, shown beside the last 30 days of website quotes and what they added up to. The Monday weekly summary email carries the week’s missed calls and how many were answered by text.
Diagram with sample figures. The tally lives in the dashboard — the Monday weekly summary email carries the call counts, and outbound messages are composed and held for you to read until your carrier registration clears (one held more than an hour is never sent).
What $49 a month actually buys
No seat fees, no annual contract, and the texts and calls on your own number at the carriers’ price, with nothing added.
No queue in front of your leads
The text-back is composed and compliance-checked the instant a call is logged — there is no batch job, no five-minute delay. What is waiting is carrier registration, not us.
Your number, your name
Texts go out from your own texting number: a local number in your area code, registered to your business. Your business line stays exactly where it is and keeps ringing as it does now. The caller dials one number and hears back from another; it works because the text opens with your business name and thanks them for calling. Getting that number registered with the carriers is the roadmap item everything else waits on.
Questions that size the job
The text-back you write asks what the work is and where, so a $280 gate repair and a $4,500 fence line stop looking identical in your missed-call list.
One shared inbox
You, your spouse who does the books, and your office manager see the same thread. Assign it, snooze it, mark it won.
Hours for each day, and the rules around them
Each day of the week has its own hours, or is closed. A different message at 9pm than at 9am, and on a day you are closed than on a day you are open; a blank message for weekends and closed days falls back to your business-hours one. Vacation mode says so honestly.
Compliance enforced before anything queues
Opt-outs, your suppression list and quiet hours are checked on the way in, and a blocked message is recorded as blocked with the reason. Your A2P 10DLC registration will be assembled from your setup and filed for you once carrier filing opens; you pay the carriers’ own fee at cost. Nothing has been filed for anybody yet, and no texting goes live before it clears.
Suppression list
Your supplier, your subs, your mother-in-law. Numbers you never want auto-texted, and one number never gets two text-backs inside the same hour.
The tally
A dashboard count of calls logged and text-backs written, next to the last 30 days of website quotes and what they added up to. If the number is not worth $49, we would rather you knew.
Sends where you work
Every rescued call queues a signed webhook (delivered within about two minutes) and exports to CSV, which is what gets it into Jobber, Housecall Pro or a spreadsheet via Zapier today. Native pushes are on the roadmap — the integrations page marks each one.
“Isn’t missed-call text-back already built into GoHighLevel? Or my phone?”
Yes. Mostly. We are not going to pretend otherwise, so here is the part that is actually worth paying for and the part that is not.
The bare feature is commoditized. We agree.
GoHighLevel includes missed-call text-back natively on plans that run $97–297/mo plus usage (HighLevel pricing page (opens in a new tab), checked October 2026). Some VoIP handsets will fire a canned SMS. If all you want is the words “sorry we missed you” going out automatically, plenty of software does that, and a few tools do it for less than we charge. Anyone who tells you this is proprietary rocket science is selling something.
It speaks contractor, not "business"
A generic auto-reply gets you a generic reply. Ours asks the two or three questions that actually sort a job in your trade — square footage, gate count, roof pitch, how many stories — so the thread you read at 4:30 already tells you whether to drive out tonight or quote it Thursday.
The carrier paperwork is our job, not yours
A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration is the part everybody underestimates. Get it wrong and carriers quietly drop your messages — you keep paying, nothing arrives, and nobody tells you. Filing it per customer and chasing it until it clears is our job (the carriers charge for the registration, any re-file, the number and the texts and calls on it, and all of that is yours at cost), and it is the piece we are building out now, which is why we will not switch your texting on before it clears. GoHighLevel hands you the form.
It lives next to quotes, hiring and reviews
The website lead, the rescued call, the crew applicant and the review request are one system with one inbox and one bill. A missed call at 2pm and a quote request at 2:10 from the same phone number get stitched into the same thread instead of two tools you check separately.
And when you should not buy it
If you already run GoHighLevel, your 10DLC is registered, and the text-back works — do not switch. Keep it. Buy CrewFunnel™ for hiring instead, or buy nothing. We would rather lose the $49 than have you cancel in month three and tell people we wasted your time.
Texting a customer is regulated. That paperwork is ours — and it is the reason nothing is texting yet.
Someone who just dialed your business has made an inquiry, and replying to it is a different animal from cold marketing texts. That is the only kind of message CallMitt will ever compose. We do not scrape lists, we do not blast promotions, and we will not build you a feature that does.
On top of that, every carrier in the United States now requires business text traffic to be registered — a brand filing and a campaign filing, per business, with sample message copy. Unregistered traffic gets filtered silently. Registration is the gate between signing up and a text actually arriving, and it is not open on our side yet: we are not going to bill you for texting that a carrier would quietly drop. In the meantime every missed call, every thread and every queued message is visible in the dashboard, so nothing sits unseen.
Read the Compliance Details Ask Us a Compliance QuestionWhat ships on every thread
Against the usual suspects
Public pricing from each company’s own pricing page, checked October 2026. If any of it is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
| Feature | CallMitt | Podium | Jobber AI Receptionist | DIY / your phone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly price | $49 | $399–599/mo, 12-month term | $29/mo add-on, on top of a Jobber plan | $0 and a Saturday |
| Commitment | Month to month | 12-month first term that renews automatically | Tied to your Jobber subscription | None |
| Number the text comes from | Your own local texting number, once registration clears | Your business number | Voice answering, not your SMS thread | Usually a different number |
| Asks your job-qualifying questions | Yes, yours | Yes, configurable | Yes, by voice | No |
| A2P 10DLC registration filed for you | We will file it for you from your setup once filing opens (none filed yet) — you pay the carriers’ own fees at cost, any re-file too, and nothing texts before it clears | Yes | Handled in-platform | You file it yourself |
| Shared inbox for the office | Yes | Yes | Inside Jobber | Your personal phone only |
| Bundled with website quotes, hiring & reviews | Yes, $199 for all four | No | No | No |
| Seasonal pause | Yes, on your Billing page | Contract dependent | Cancel the add-on | n/a |
Podium lists Core at $399 a month and Pro at $599 a month (Signature is priced by quote), on a 12-month term that renews automatically; phones, extra numbers and add-ons cost extra (Podium pricing page (opens in a new tab), checked October 2026). Jobber sells an AI receptionist add-on for $29 a month on top of a paid Jobber plan (Jobber pricing page (opens in a new tab), checked October 2026). Podium is a broader reputation and payments platform — if you need review management and payment collection too, that price is buying more than text-back.
We are not going to quote you a recovery rate we have not earned yet.
Plenty of vendors will show you a percentage on a slide. We are early, and inventing a number would be the fastest way to lose your trust. So here is arithmetic you can check instead of a statistic you cannot.
CallMitt costs $588 a year. Hiring a plumber averages $341 (opens in a new tab) nationally and a new fence $3,276 (opens in a new tab) (HomeAdvisor, June 2026). Take a $1,500 job as an example: recover one in twelve months and you are ahead by $912. Two of them cover the entire four-tool bundle for a year — $2,388 — with room left over.
Everything after that is upside, and the dashboard tally tells you which side of the line you are on. If three months go by and the number is honestly zero, cancel from the dashboard. No retention call, no “let me transfer you to my manager.”
The next name
is who a caller rings when you cannot pick up. Answering fast gives you the best chance at the job.
Under 3%
of callers who reach voicemail leave a message (Invoca, 2024 (opens in a new tab)). That is the system you are running today, for free.
Dashboard shown with sample figures. Your numbers will be your own, and we will not dress them up.
Questions contractors actually ask
It comes from a number that is yours, though not the line they called. Every account gets its own texting number: a local number in your area code, registered to your business. US carriers do not let business texting software send from a number on a mobile plan, which is where many small contractors run the business, so your business line stays exactly where it is and keeps ringing as it does now. The caller dials one number and hears back from another. It works because the text opens with your business name and thanks them for calling. Getting that number registered is the piece we have not switched on yet, and we will tell you straight when it is your turn rather than quietly queueing forever.
Nothing is composed at all. The text-back only runs off a call you logged as missed, and it will not run twice on the same person inside an hour — that guard is enforced against the outbox, so a blocked attempt does not use up your one shot.
Not if you put them on the suppression list, which takes about a minute to set up from your contacts. A suppressed number is checked before anything is composed, and the attempt is recorded as blocked with the reason so you can see it happened.
You do. We give you a starting template that already carries your business name and the opt-out line, and you edit it in the dashboard until it sounds like you — including the question you want asked. Separate versions for business hours, after hours, weekends, holidays and vacation.
Into a shared inbox in the dashboard. Your office manager or your spouse can see the same thread and answer it, which is the part that surprises people — you stop being the only person who can respond. A text to your phone the moment a lead arrives is on your Account page (Also text me at). Those texts are not sent yet: they will come from Tailgate Office's own texting number, never your business's own number, once the mobile carriers have approved our texting program and we have moved lead alerts to it; until then every lead alert comes by email. A new quote or applicant emails you; a missed call does not, because you log those yourself and are already looking at the screen.
Your messages, your hours and your suppression list can be configured the day you sign up, and the shared inbox works immediately. Carrier registration is the wait, and it is not open yet — until it clears, every text-back is composed and held in your outbox where you can read it, and the inbox is where you work the lead.
Yes. Pause it on your Billing page and keep your settings, your message templates and your history. That is different from cancelling, and it is different from paying a reduced fee to hold your seat — you just stop being billed until you switch it back on.
They catch different people. NapkinPrice catches the homeowner who is on your website at 9pm. CallMitt catches the one who skipped the website and dialed. You can leak from both holes, which is why the bundle is $199 instead of $148 for two.
One plan, everything
It starts with 30 days free. No credit card, no setup fee, cancel from the dashboard.
The Tailgate Office™ Bundle
25% less than the four tools’ single prices added up ($266)
Start Free TrialOnly need CallMitt? After the trial you can keep it on its own at $49/mo.
Not sure? Ask us at support@tailgateoffice.com — and if you want to see the whole flow, log a call, watch the right template get picked, see the compliance checks run and the message queue in your outbox. That is what the 30-day trial is for.
The office your truck never had.
Set it up tonight. It quotes tomorrow's leads, and every missed call you log gets answered from one inbox. Free for 30 days, no card required.