Cloverly vs Ruby: a human by the minute, or an AI at a flat rate

These are not two versions of the same product at different prices. They are two different answers to the question of who should pick up when you can't: a trained person working from your instructions, or software wired to your calendar. Each answer is better at different things, and the table below is the honest map. Every Ruby fact in it comes from Ruby's own public pages, checked in July 2026, and linked in the sources at the bottom.

If you only read two rows, read the first and the last. The pricing row decides what a bad-weather month costs you. The script row decides whether the thing answering your phone behaves the same way on call two hundred as it did on call two.

Credit where it is due: Ruby publishes its prices, which most of the live-answering industry does not. It also says there are no additional fees for activation, onboarding, setup, or customization, and that its optional AI enhancements come at no extra cost. Here is what the published plans work out to per minute — our arithmetic on Ruby's numbers, not a rate Ruby quotes:

• Starter: $250 for 50 receptionist minutes — $5.00 a minute.
• Professional: $395 for 100 minutes — $3.95 a minute.
• Business: $720 for 200 minutes — $3.60 a minute.
• Enterprise: $1,725 for 500 minutes — $3.45 a minute.

Now put a trade shop's July against those blocks. If your average call runs four minutes, 200 minutes is fifty calls a month — under two a day. A storm week alone can blow through that.

Cloverly's side of this row: $497, $997, or $2,497 a month, flat, month to month, cancel with one email. No per-minute or per-call charges — we agree on a volume ceiling for a shop your size before you start, and if you outgrow it we talk before anything changes. The rate you sign at is locked for as long as you stay, and if we haven't booked you a job in the first 30 days, you email us and we refund the month. The point of flat pricing is specific: the month your phone rings the most is the month per-minute billing costs the most, and it is also the month you can least afford to think about it.

We are not going to pretend this axis away. Where Ruby is strong, it is strong for reasons that are on its own pages and easy to verify:

• A real person picks up. Some callers will not talk to a machine, and no script in the world fixes that. With Ruby, that objection never comes up.
• Empathy is native. A trained human handles a panicked or angry caller without an escalation rule, because that is what humans are for.
• Track record. Ruby's site claims 20-plus years serving small businesses and 15,000-plus businesses using it. Those are its numbers, not ours, but they are the kind of numbers a new company cannot say.
• Its AI is optional and behind humans. Ruby describes itself as people-powered and AI-enhanced — the technology assists the receptionist rather than replacing her.

Cloverly's side, stated as plainly: software answers. It says it is an AI in the first sentence of every call, partly because in a number of states the law requires it and partly because pretending otherwise is a bad way to open a relationship. Some callers can tell even when it is not saying so. And we are new — we have not taken a paying customer's call yet, and we are not going to invent a customer list or a testimonial to sit next to Ruby's fifteen thousand.

This is the axis Cloverly was built around, so here is exactly what happens in the ninety seconds after hello, and then the two honest caveats.

• It asks your intake questions, in your order, in the caller's language — is the limb on the house or the lawn, can a truck reach the drop zone, is anything touching a line, is the water shut off, how old is the unit. It only knows the services you gave us, so it cannot volunteer work you don't do.
• It reads your calendar live and applies your rules — job duration, drive-time buffer either side, notice required, jobs per day — then offers up to three windows that are actually open.
• When the caller picks one, it checks the calendar again before holding anything, because calendars move in the ninety seconds a person takes to decide.
• Seconds after the hang-up, you get an email: who called, what they wanted, the answers to your questions, and the window they took.
• Spanish on every call, at every tier — the greeting offers both languages inside the first six seconds and the conversation follows the caller.

The caveats, because this page is only useful if it is honest in both directions. Writing the calendar event for newly signed shops is waiting on Google's review of our calendar access — until it clears for your shop, Cloverly holds the window the caller picked and confirms it with you before anything is written. And texting — the missed-call text-back, the alert to your phone — is gated on A2P carrier registration, which every US business sending automated texts has to file and which typically takes one to seven days per shop. Until then, everything reaches you by email within seconds.

On Ruby's side, the verified facts are these: its receptionists can schedule appointments, and scheduling is listed among the optional features on its pricing page. What its pages do not say is how a receptionist sees your availability — a live calendar or a summary you gave them at setup — or who encodes the rules that prevent a Lehi job and a Bountiful job from landing back to back with no drive time between them. Those are questions, not accusations. Ask them, and ask whether scheduling minutes bill like any other minutes.

Your number never moves. It stays on your carrier, in your name — no porting, no new number on the truck. Conditional call forwarding sends only the calls you didn't answer to Cloverly, so your cell rings first on every call, always. Then two independent layers underneath:

• If our software is slow or erroring, the call forwards to your cell and the caller never knows anything happened.
• If our software is down entirely, the carrier's own fallback — configured at the phone company, outside our infrastructure — forwards the call to your cell with us nowhere in the loop.

Worst case, you are back to exactly the phone you have today. On install day we prove it: we switch our own side off on purpose and call your number while you watch it ring your cell. We cannot tell you what Ruby's failure path is, because its public pages do not describe one, and we will not fill that silence with speculation. The fair move is to put the same question to any vendor, us included: describe your failure mode in one sentence. A good answer ends at your cell phone.

Pick Ruby if any of these describe you:

• A human voice is the product. If your callers are in a bad moment and the empathy is the service, a trained person is the right tool and no AI vendor should tell you otherwise.
• You will not risk the AI objection. Some callers hang up on machines. If losing even those callers is unacceptable, buy the human.
• You want a company that has done this for a long time. Ruby claims 20-plus years and 15,000-plus businesses. We are a new company with zero. If vendor maturity is your deciding axis, Ruby wins it outright.
• Your call volume is low and steady. Fifty predictable minutes a month fits a $250 block just fine, and flat pricing buys you nothing.

Pick Cloverly if the problem you are actually buying your way out of is volume and the loop after the call: the storm week that would eat a minute block, the 9 pm call that should become a booked estimate instead of a message slip, the Spanish caller at the third sentence, the calendar that should fill during the call instead of after three rounds of phone tag. That is the job this was built for, at a price that does not move with the weather.

One honest step before you talk to either of us: pull your call log for the last two weeks. Count the calls you missed, count the minutes you were on the phone, and price both against Ruby's published blocks and our flat tiers. Send us the numbers and we will tell you which column to buy — including when the answer is Ruby.