Missed call cost calculator: estimate the value you could recover

Nothing here is filled in for you, and no plan is selected. Nine inputs decide the estimate, and each one is yours: monthly calls, spam share, missed-call share, the share your current callbacks already win back, the share that were real opportunities, your answer-to-book and show-or-close rates in low, base and high bands, your average job value, and your gross margin. The calculate button stays off until every field holds a number. No industry averages sit behind it. A plumber's spam share and a law firm's job value have little in common, so borrowed defaults would mislead. An input you cannot fill is the thing to go and measure.

Call volume

missed-call rate

spam exclusion

existing callback recovery

qualified-call rate

incremental answer-to-book rate

show/close rate

average job value

gross margin

Read the chain before the totals. The result first shows your non-spam calls, the ones you missed, the ones your callbacks did not recover, and the qualified calls left over. Any argument about the result belongs in those four steps, because disputing the result means disputing one of them. Then it turns those calls into possible jobs, revenue and gross profit in low, base and high bands. It also shows how many completed jobs it takes to cover your coverage cost. You will never see one big loss number. Fractional jobs stay fractions. A base case of half a job a month is a real answer, and it may mean the fix is not worth buying.

Missed calls

currently unrecovered qualified calls

possible recovered jobs

revenue range

gross-profit range

break-even jobs

non_spam_calls = monthly_calls × (1 − spam_share)
missed_non_spam_calls = non_spam_calls × missed_share
unrecovered_missed_calls = missed_non_spam_calls × (1 − callback_recovery)
unrecovered_qualified_calls = unrecovered_missed_calls × qualified_share
possible_recovered_jobs = unrecovered_qualified_calls × answer_to_book × show_or_close
possible_gross_profit = possible_revenue × gross_margin
break_even_jobs = coverage_cost ÷ (job_revenue × gross_margin)

Each rate in the formula multiplies the next, so optimism compounds quietly. Two hopeful guesses three fields apart can double the answer while each looks fine alone. Bands must run low, base, high in order, or the model will not run. Results are not rounded up to whole jobs. Some things stay out on purpose: repeat work, referrals, lifetime value and the cost of a badly handled call. It adds no speed bonus either. The best-known speed research covered web inquiries at mostly larger firms around 2010, and firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it⁴. Speed helps, but that study cannot put a price on one missed call.

Core formula

scenario bands

rounding

what is excluded

Modeled profit means little until it sits beside the real cost of coverage. Put your monthly total in the custom field, including anything you pay on top of a subscription. A plan preset fills that one field and nothing else. The presets are First AI Employee's voice plans as read from its pricing page on 20 October 2026: Essential at $99/month with 400 included minutes, Growth at $199/month with 1,000, and Scale at $349/month with 2,000². Check included minutes and overage too. For a staff comparison, a receptionist's median wage was $18.27 an hour in May 2025³. Benefits were 30.0 percent of private employers' compensation costs in June 2026, so a wage alone understates a hire⁶.

First AI Employee plans

• First AI Employee offers a managed AI receptionist built around a business's call rules. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S01.
• The voice product answers inbound calls and does not place outbound or cold calls. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S04.
• The AI receptionist is for businesses operating in the United States. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S02, S04, S09.
• The AI receptionist answers calls 24/7, including nights, weekends and holidays. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S01.
• It books appointments straight onto a connected Google, Outlook or Calendly calendar, or onto its own built-in calendar. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S01.
• It transfers urgent calls to a person by rules the business sets. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S01, S04.
• $99/month with 400 included minutes. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S02.
• $199/month with 1,000 included minutes. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S02.
• $349/month with 2,000 included minutes. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S02.
• Essential has a seven-day trial with up to 400 voice minutes and no SMS. A card is required, the trial starts when the number is live, and it becomes Essential at $99/month unless canceled. Growth and Scale have no free trial. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S01, S02, S09.
• Overage is off by default. If it is turned on, extra minutes cost $0.20 each on Essential and Growth and $0.10 on Scale. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S02, S09.
• Business Texting is a separate $50/month purchase on Growth or Scale, with 2,000 SMS segments a month on Growth and 4,000 on Scale. It is not available on Essential. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S02.
• Billing for a transferred call runs until First AI Employee's line drops, not until the other person picks up. Checked 2026-10-20; sources S04, S09.

custom monthly cost

A week of call records turns three of these guesses into facts. Mark each call answered, missed or abandoned. Match every missed number against later calls to see who you already won back. That is your callback-recovery input, and a higher figure shrinks the result. Expect some of your own callbacks to go unanswered: in a 2020 Pew survey, eight in ten US adults said they generally do not answer calls from unknown numbers⁵. Use gross profit, not revenue, because a moving company's revenue still has to pay the crew and the truck. Then tag which missed calls were real opportunities and which were suppliers, wrong numbers and sales pitches. Defend every number you keep.

Use a seven-day audit

use gross profit

measure callback recovery

Your figures stay in your browser. The calculation runs on this page, nothing is stored, and nothing you type is sent over the network when you press calculate. This site runs no analytics and sends neither your figures nor coarse usage buckets to any service. Downloads and share links happen only when you ask for them. A share link carries every assumption after # in the URL. Recipients can read those values, so consider a downloaded file when sharing with your bookkeeper. No caller names or call details are needed anywhere on this page. Counts and rates are the whole input, which keeps the model easy to share.