Setup Lift is an AI front desk that picks up on the first ring, answers questions about your services and pricing, and writes the booking straight into your BookingKoala — nights, weekends and while your crews are on site.
We run this on our own cleaning company in Los Angeles before we sell it to anyone.
Most residential cleaning companies spend real money getting the phone to ring, then miss a chunk of those calls because everyone is cleaning, driving or asleep. The caller doesn't leave a voicemail. They call the next company on the list.
People book home services in the evening. If nobody answers, that job is gone by morning.
Answering mid-job costs you quality and costs the caller patience.
A part-time receptionist costs multiples of this, and still doesn't cover nights and weekends.
We counted our own missed calls for one month at VAST Cleaning. Thirty-one. At our average ticket that is roughly $5,400 that walked away without us ever knowing it existed.
Typical for a small residential cleaning company running any kind of marketing.
Evenings, weekends, crews on site. Almost nobody leaves a voicemail — they call the next company.
Seven jobs. At $180 each that is $1,260 of revenue lost every month — against $249.
A part-time receptionist costs more than that and still goes home at six. The AI front desk answers at 11pm on a Sunday, quotes from your real price list, and writes the booking into BookingKoala while you sleep.
You keep your existing number and your existing booking system. Nothing about how you run jobs changes.
Services, pricing, service area, hours, add-ons, the questions you get asked most — loaded into the agent.
Natural conversation, not a phone tree. It qualifies the job, quotes from your real price list and handles the usual objections.
Written directly into your account with the right service, date and address.
There are AI add-ons in this market. There are consultants who configure BookingKoala. There is nobody doing both, and staying.
| Option | Where it falls short |
|---|---|
| Jobber AI | Only works if you move your whole business into Jobber. |
| Podium AI | A general-purpose tool. It doesn't know how cleaning jobs are scoped or priced. |
| Housecall Pro AI | Surface-level. It won't complete a real booking end to end. |
| BookingKoala consultants | They configure it, invoice you, and leave. No AI, no ongoing support. |
| Setup Lift | Configures BookingKoala, runs the AI, and stays on as your team. |
We built this for VAST Cleaning, a working residential and post-construction cleaning company in Los Angeles. Every call flow, every pricing question and every objection in this system came from calls we actually take. When we say we understand how a cleaning business actually runs, that's not positioning — it's our other company. — Arkady Astvatsaturov, founder, Setup Lift & VAST Cleaning
One plan, one price, no per-seat maths. Most cleaning companies stay well inside the included minutes.
Three things worth reading first. We wrote them because we had to answer these questions for ourselves.
Put in your own call volume and average job value. The same arithmetic we ran on our own company.
How the booking lands in your account complete, and why cleaning pricing needs a specialist.
Honest comparison of a call centre, a receptionist and an AI front desk — including where each one fails.
Tell us a little and we'll come back with a straight answer about whether this fits your company — and what it would actually cost you. No pitch deck, no discovery call ritual.
If you want to hear it before you buy it, say so and we'll run a live call against your own pricing.