Why Talkify over Tradies Line | Talkify vs Tradies Line

What each of us publishes.

Not what we think they do, and not what a salesperson said on a call. Their column is what Tradies Line states on their own website, read in September 2026. Where they do not publish something, the row says so instead of guessing, because "not published" is a fact about the website and everything else would be a guess about the company.

What to look at	Tradies Line	Talkify
Where the company is	Sydney, Australia. No founding date is published on the site; the Australian Business Register records the company from July 2026.	Christchurch, New Zealand. Talkify has answered New Zealand business calls since 2024, built by a studio over twelve years old.
Where your call recordings and transcripts are held	Nothing is published about where recordings or transcripts are stored.	New Zealand data centres, stated in writing.
The currency on your invoice	Prices are published in Australian dollars, and the New Zealand pages show the same figure with no currency marked.	New Zealand dollars, from a New Zealand company.
GST	The Australian Business Register records the company as not registered for GST.	GST registered in New Zealand, shown on every invoice for your accountant to code.
Who sells the phone line	No line is sold. You forward your existing number from your own mobile plan.	We do. A real New Zealand number on our own carrier account, with the agent already on it.
Where support answers from	A contact form that they say reaches the founders, with a reply inside one business day, or a fifteen minute video call. No phone number or street address is published.	A New Zealand phone number, in your timezone, answered by the people who built it.
Integrations	Google Calendar, Outlook, Xero and ServiceM8 are marked live and self-serve. QuickBooks, Simpro, Fergus, AroFlo and ServiceTitan are marked as available on request. No API, webhooks or Zapier are mentioned.	Every name we publish has a connector we wrote and can show you, plus a documented REST API, webhooks and Zapier for the rest.
What you are billed for	Calls, texts and AI credits, with top-up packs valid for thirty days. What consumes a credit is not defined on the site.	Minutes. The plan allowance and the per-minute rate past it are both published.
Mobile apps	None mentioned on the site.	iOS and Android apps on every plan, with transcripts, summaries and alerts.
What else runs on the same account	Inbound answering, website chat, quotes, invoices and payment collection.	Reception, plus outgoing campaigns, phone surveys, invoice chasing from your own Xero, wellness checks, an on-call roster, a front counter agent and a website chat widget.

Taken from Tradies Line's own public pages in September 2026, and from ours. Something changed, or we have described your product wrongly? Tell us and we will correct it. Costs are deliberately not in this table: they live on the comparison table, in one place, with a checked date against them.

The fair bit

Where Tradies Line is the better pick.

A trade business that wants to try AI answering without paying for anything first and would rather not change its number. Their free tier needs no card, the plans are counted in whole calls rather than minutes so the bill is easy to picture, and they state plainly that there is no overage: usage stops at zero and you buy another pack. The scope is tidy too, with quotes, invoices, payment collection and website chat in one place, and the founders will take a fifteen minute video call before you buy anything. They also publish that the agent tells callers early that it is an AI and captures a lead rather than guessing when it is unsure, which is the right instinct and not everyone says it out loud.

We would rather you bought the right thing than bought from us. If the paragraph above describes your situation, go and talk to them, and tell them we sent you.

Ask both of us the same things.

Three questions worth putting to Tradies Line before you sign anything. They are not gotchas and they are not accusations: they are the things about this kind of product that cost people money when they find out late.

Question 1.

Which currency you are actually being billed in, and what the GST position is. Their prices are published in Australian dollars, and their New Zealand pages show the same figure with no currency marked, so ask what a New Zealand company pays and who carries the exchange rate. The Australian Business Register also records the company as not registered for GST, so ask what your invoice will say and whether there is anything on it to claim back.

Question 2.

Where your call recordings and transcripts are held. Nothing about storage location is published on the site, and those recordings are your customers' personal information, which the Privacy Act makes your responsibility rather than your supplier's. Ask for the country in writing.

Question 3.

What you are actually buying, on three points. No phone line is sold, so ask what conditional forwarding from your own mobile plan costs you per forwarded call, and what it means for the number that shows when you ring the customer back. Ask which integrations are live and self-serve today rather than listed as available on request. And ask what consumes an AI credit, since the plans are counted in them and the site does not define one.

Now turn them on us. Here are the answers.

A page telling you to interrogate everyone else and then going quiet about itself is worth nothing. So these are ours, written down, and we will put any of them in an email if you want them in writing.

How long have you been going?	Talkify has answered New Zealand business calls since 2024. The studio behind it, D3V Services Limited in Christchurch, has been building software for over twelve years and was doing voice and telephony work before Talkify had a name.
Who answers when something is wrong?	A New Zealand phone number, in your timezone, answered by the people who wrote the thing. Not a chat widget, and not a reply from another hemisphere in the morning.
Where are my call recordings held?	New Zealand data centres. Audio, transcripts and call metadata, stated in writing on the privacy policy rather than implied by a claim about ownership or encryption.
Who sells the phone line?	We do. We hold a direct commercial relationship with the New Zealand carrier our numbers ride on, so numbers are provisioned on our own account, the routing is ours to change, and the number stays yours if you leave.
Which integrations are real?	All of the ones we name. We keep a hard internal rule that nothing is named on this website until the connector behind it exists and we can point you at it in code, which is why the list is shorter than some.
Is there an API?	Yes, a documented REST API with webhooks and Zapier, so whatever we have not built a connector for, you or your developer can.
Is there an app?	Yes, iOS and Android, on every plan. Transcripts, summaries and alerts in your pocket rather than in an email you re-read later.
I already run Fergus. How much setting up is there?	Press Sign in with Fergus and there is almost none. We build the whole account out of what Fergus already knows: your company, your team, your line pointed at the right town, your customer list copying in behind you and Fergus already connected. You land on the agent builder with a reception agent half made rather than on an empty screen.
I have no calendar and no customer list. Do I need to go and get some?	No. You get a diary of ours, one column per person, that the agent checks before it offers a time and books straight into, included with an agent rather than charged for separately. Every caller is filed as you go with their number, what they rang about and the calls before it, so the address book builds itself. Connect Google or Outlook later and the diary carries on beside it.

Six things that are hard to see on a demo call.

None of them are features, and every one is something you can check rather than something we can claim. They are the reasons this comparison usually turns on something other than the voice.

We were doing this before there was a name for it.
We sell the phone line itself, not just the thing that answers it.
The integrations are ours, written one at a time.
A New Zealand phone number, answered by the people who built it.
Calling Talkify "just an AI receptionist" is simply wrong.
Built on knowing how phones work.

Each of those is argued out, with what backs it, on the alternatives page, beside every other provider selling into New Zealand. The rest of the platform the fifth of those names, outgoing campaigns, phone surveys, invoice chasing from your own Xero, wellness checks, the on-call roster, the front counter agent and website chat, runs on the same account and the same bill.

And what ours costs.

One price, published, with the allowance and the rate past it published beside it. Tradies Line's pricing is not on this page on purpose: competitor prices live in one place on this website, under the date they were last checked, because a figure kept in two places drifts and one of the two starts lying.

Talkify, NZD, plus GST

$129 a month, founding rate.

200 minutes included, then 10c a minute, both published. No setup fee, no lock-in, and no platform fee bolted on top of the minutes. The founding rate holds for your first 3 months and the standard rate after it is $199, printed here rather than discovered on invoice four.

See the cost table → Our pricing →

The comparison table works out what 200 minutes of answered calls actually costs on every provider's published pricing, setup fees, monthly platform fees, GST treatment and per-minute overage included. For what Tradies Line sells, who it suits and the whole New Zealand market grouped by what each provider actually is, see the Tradies Line page and the alternatives.

Frequently asked.

The questions we hear most. If yours isn't here, ring our live demo agent on 03 242 1262, it'll either answer or queue a callback from a human.

What is the difference between Talkify and Tradies Line?

They publish their whole price list and say plainly that nothing gets added at checkout, which is a better answer than half this market manages, and a free tier with no card is an easy way to try the idea at all. Two things are worth weighing against it. The company is new: the Australian Business Register records it from July 2026, and the oldest post on their own blog is the same month. Everyone starts somewhere and that is not a criticism, but it is a fact worth knowing when you are handing over your phone. And what they sell stops at the software. Your number stays with your mobile provider and is forwarded on, so the line, the forwarding charges and the number that shows when you ring back are all still somebody else's. We sell the line itself, on our own carrier account here, with the agent already answering on it, priced in New Zealand dollars with GST on the invoice and your call recordings held in this country.

When is Tradies Line the better choice?

A trade business that wants to try AI answering without paying for anything first and would rather not change its number. Their free tier needs no card, the plans are counted in whole calls rather than minutes so the bill is easy to picture, and they state plainly that there is no overage: usage stops at zero and you buy another pack. The scope is tidy too, with quotes, invoices, payment collection and website chat in one place, and the founders will take a fifteen minute video call before you buy anything. They also publish that the agent tells callers early that it is an AI and captures a lead rather than guessing when it is unsure, which is the right instinct and not everyone says it out loud.

What should I ask both of you?

Which currency you are actually being billed in, and what the GST position is. Their prices are published in Australian dollars, and their New Zealand pages show the same figure with no currency marked, so ask what a New Zealand company pays and who carries the exchange rate. The Australian Business Register also records the company as not registered for GST, so ask what your invoice will say and whether there is anything on it to claim back. Where your call recordings and transcripts are held. Nothing about storage location is published on the site, and those recordings are your customers' personal information, which the Privacy Act makes your responsibility rather than your supplier's. Ask for the country in writing. What you are actually buying, on three points. No phone line is sold, so ask what conditional forwarding from your own mobile plan costs you per forwarded call, and what it means for the number that shows when you ring the customer back. Ask which integrations are live and self-serve today rather than listed as available on request. And ask what consumes an AI credit, since the plans are counted in them and the site does not define one. Ask us the same ones. Our answers are on this page and we will put any of them in writing.

Which is cheaper, Talkify or Tradies Line?

Competitor prices are not on this page, deliberately. They live on our comparison table with the date they were last checked against them, because a price kept in two places drifts and one of the two starts lying. That page works out what 200 minutes of answered calls costs on every provider's published pricing, with setup fees, monthly platform fees, GST treatment and per-minute overage included.

Where does this information about Tradies Line come from?

Their own public pages, read in September 2026. Where they do not publish something we say that rather than guessing, and nothing in the table is a claim about how they run their business. If we have got something wrong about your product, email [email protected] and we will fix it.

Can I hear Talkify before I decide?

Yes, and without handing over your details. Ring 03 242 1262 any time, day or night, and talk to a live Talkify agent in a real New Zealand voice. No form, no card, no follow-up call unless you ask for one. Try to do the same with everyone on your shortlist.

Why Talkify over Tradies Line.