The missed-call receptionist for US small businesses: calls answered, a text back within seconds, appointments booked into the owner's own calendar.
A plumber on a roof cannot answer the phone. textduty gives the business a number; every call rings the owner for twenty seconds, and when nobody picks up an assistant answers from the business's own stored facts, offers real appointment times, and books into the owner's Google calendar. When the caller hangs up first, or would rather not talk to a machine, the same assistant continues by text.
what makes it different
- It never invents a fact. Every price, hour, service or time it states comes from the business's data or from a tool result; a post-check compares every number in a drafted text with that data and holds anything that does not match, texting the owner instead.
- Every failure ends with a human. No path ends in silence, a wrong booking or a made-up answer; the worst case is "let me check with the owner and text you back", and the owner is told.
- The owner's calendar is the only schedule. The assistant never books blind: if the calendar cannot be read, it takes messages.
- Compliance is code, not a policy page. STOP is honoured before every text, quiet hours are enforced in the caller's time zone, carrier registration is done for the client, and call recording follows a state-by-state consent table with a review date.
how it is built
- stack
- FastAPI, Postgres 16 with row-level security per client, a Postgres job queue with systemd timers, Next.js with plain CSS, Caddy. No Docker, no Redis, no Kafka.
- vendors
- Twilio (numbers), Stripe (cards), Deepgram (speech), Anthropic Claude (language), each behind our own interface so a swap is credentials plus one file.
- tests
- 340+ API tests with 90 %+ branch coverage on scheduling, compliance, billing and conversation; property-based tests; contract tests against recorded vendor responses; mutation testing at 92 % killed; a load test at ten times expected peak; browser journeys with accessibility checks at 320 px.
- status
- Live: sign-up, checkout, dashboard, calendar sync, the status page. Waiting on carrier registration for texting and on the first pilot clients.
price
$199 a month, 500 conversations included, $0.50 each after. The first ten clients pay $99 a month for a year in exchange for a written testimonial.
textduty.com · status