How to choose

Managed, self-serve, or a person on the desk.

There are three real ways to stop losing enquiries, and they are not competing products. They suit different businesses. Here is the honest version, including when we are the wrong answer.

Short answer

If you can spare an hour a week to run it and one lost enquiry costs you a few thousand rand, buy a self-serve tool. If a single lost enquiry costs you more than a year of the fee, and nobody in your business has that hour, have it managed. If your front desk also handles walk-ins, deliveries and admin, hire a person.

The three routes

Route 1

A self-serve tool you run yourself

Cost: Roughly R850 to R2,500 a month, plus a setup fee at some providers
What it asks of you: 1 to 3 hours a week, ongoing
Suits: One or two vans. One decision-maker. A single phone line.

You sign up, you write the greeting, you build the questions the assistant asks.
You are the one who notices when it starts answering wrongly, and you are the one who fixes it.
Nobody is watching the enquiries that came in and went nowhere.
It is genuinely good value if you have the hour a week and the appetite to tinker.

Route 2

Hire a person to answer

Cost: Market rates for an administrator or receptionist, plus payroll costs
What it asks of you: Recruitment, training, management, cover for leave and sick days
Suits: A busy front desk with walk-ins, deliveries and admin beyond enquiries.

A person handles nuance and awkward callers better than any software.
They work office hours. The 18:40 breakdown call still goes unanswered.
They leave, and the knowledge in their head leaves with them.
Cost scales with hours covered, not with enquiry volume.

Route 3

Managed infrastructure, run for you

Cost: R3,000 per month plus a once-off R6,000 setup fee
What it asks of you: A monthly review. Nothing weekly.
Suits: Operations where a single missed enquiry is worth more than a year of the fee: plant hire, civils, mining services, logistics, industrial repair.

The intake, the site, the Google presence and the follow-up are configured, monitored and adjusted by us.
When something breaks, it is our problem before it is yours.
You get a named person accountable for it, not a support queue.
No minimum term. 30 days written notice. If it is not earning its place you leave.

Cost ranges for Route 1 reflect prices publicly advertised by South African providers at the time of writing and change without notice. Route 2 depends entirely on the role you hire. Route 3 is our own published price.

The question that actually decides it

Not "which is cheapest". The question is: when an enquiry is lost, whose job was it to notice?

With a self-serve tool the answer is you, in the evening, if you happen to look. With a person on the desk the answer is that person, during office hours. With managed infrastructure it is written into an agreement with a named person behind it.

For a one-van operation that is a fair trade and the cheap tool wins. For a plant-hire yard where one machine on hire for a month is worth more than a year of any of these options, it is not a close call.

When we are the wrong answer

You have almost no inbound enquiries yet. Fix the demand first. Better intake on a silent phone changes nothing.
You want a once-off website and no ongoing service. That is a custom project, scoped and quoted separately. See custom builds.
You want guaranteed rankings, guaranteed leads or a guaranteed revenue number. Nobody can honestly promise those, and we do not.
You enjoy building and tuning this yourself. Then a self-serve tool is genuinely better value for you than paying us to do it.

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