Minutes

Minutes are the unit DispatchLine plans are measured in: the talk time on calls the agent handles, rounded up per call, counted so you can see them, but not billed: paid plans carry no per-minute charge.

Why it matters for a service company

A plan priced per call hides the difference between a twenty-second spam hangup and a twelve-minute conversation about a furnace. Counting talk time lets you check any vendor’s bill against numbers you already have. Count the calls the office logged last month, estimate how long a typical one runs, and multiply. That is your monthly usage, and it tells you which plan fits before you sign anything.

The same arithmetic shows you what a spike costs. A heat wave can double an HVAC shop’s call volume for a week; a first freeze does the same to plumbers. On a flat plan a spike costs nothing extra, which is the point: the month the phone rings most is the month you least want a variable bill.

How DispatchLine handles it

The free trial is measured the same way. Sign-up is self-serve and open to any US business: 3 days from the start of your subscription or 150 minutes, whichever comes first, with a card on file and nothing charged before day 4. A call can last up to 8 minutes. When the minutes run out the agent answers with a short message saying the line is paused, so a trial cannot quietly run up a bill.

On day 4 the plan you chose is charged, and the paid plans are:

• One Truck: $149 per month, 1-2 trucks, no per-minute charge (fair use, not a meter)
• Crew: $299 per month, 3-6 trucks, no per-minute charge (fair use, not a meter)
• Fleet: $549 per month, 7+ trucks or more than one location, no per-minute charge (fair use, not a meter)

Every plan has every call-handling feature; Fleet adds several locations, set up with our team. Plans run month to month, and you cancel renewal any month from the billing page.

As an illustration, not a forecast: the fair-use guidance for One Truck, 800 answered minutes a month, is roughly 267 to 400 calls if each lasts 2 to 3 minutes — useful for sizing your plan, not for predicting a bill. Actual call lengths vary, which is why the count on your own log is the number to trust.

Two rounding rules apply. Talk time is rounded up per call. A robocall that spam screening hangs up on counts as one minute, so a noisy line shows up as a stack of one-minute entries in the call log, each marked as spam. The full schedule is on the pricing page and in the guide to plans and minutes; the first-month guarantee has its own page.

Related terms

• Robocall, the one-minute entries on a screened line
• After-hours, where most forwarding starts
• Call forwarding, how calls reach the agent in the first place