How EarlyBird works,
written down.
What runs where, who can reach what, how minutes are counted and what happens when something fails. Written for the person who has to sign off on us — not for a search engine.
What EarlyBird is
An AI receptionist for businesses that lose money when the phone goes unanswered. It picks up, holds a real conversation, books into your calendar, writes the record into your CRM, and hands you a summary.
You forward your existing number, or take one from us. Calls arrive at our telephony provider, get bridged to a voice model in real time, and the agent works from your own instructions — your hours, your services, your prices, your booking rules. It can book, reschedule and cancel appointments, answer questions about what you do, take messages, and transfer to a person when it should.
- Deployment
- Fully hosted by us on AWS. There is nothing to install and no server for you to run.
- Hosting region
- United States.
- Setup time
- Most businesses are answering calls the same day. Verification is a single test call.
- Pricing model
- Prepaid minutes at a flat $0.49 per minute, billed by the second. No per-user licences.
- Integrated CRM
- Built into every workspace — includes bookings, customer insights, team schedules, SMS follow-ups, call transcripts, and marketing.
- Team size
- Unlimited teammates on every account — seats are not metered.
- Multi-location
- One workspace can run many businesses, each with its own number, hours, services and agent.
Answers in parallel
Every caller is answered at once. There is no single receptionist to be busy, so a rush hour doesn't become a queue or a voicemail box.
Books while the caller is on the line
The agent reads real availability and writes a real appointment during the call, so callers hang up with a confirmed time rather than a promise of a callback.
Follows up in writing
Confirmations and reminders go out by text, and the call summary lands in your dashboard and your CRM.
Learns your business, not the internet
The agent works from the configuration you give it and the availability it can actually see. It is not left to improvise about your prices or your hours.
What happens on a call
End to end, from the moment a caller dials to the moment the record lands in your CRM.
- 1
The call arrives
Your number rings — forwarded from your carrier, or a number we provisioned. Our telephony provider hands the call to us with the caller's number and nothing else.
- 2
We identify the business, not the caller
The call is matched to the business profile that owns the number. That match — not anything said on the call — decides which data the rest of the call is allowed to touch.
- 3
Audio bridges to the voice model
A dedicated media service bridges the phone audio to the voice model in both directions for the length of the call. That service holds no data credentials and can reach no records.
- 4
The agent works from your configuration
It is given your instructions, hours, services and the capabilities you enabled — and no caller identity. Everything it can do beyond talking is an explicit, authenticated tool it has to call.
- 5
It acts on live data
Checking availability, booking, rescheduling, cancelling, looking up services or transferring the call are separate authenticated requests, each scoped to the one business the call belongs to.
- 6
The call ends and is settled
Duration is metered in seconds against your balance exactly once, guarded so a retry can't double-charge. Recording and transcript are written to that business's own encrypted vault.
- 7
Follow-up runs off the call path
Summarising, scoring, CRM sync and reminder scheduling happen afterwards on an internal queue, so nothing slows the conversation down and a failed sync never drops a call.
Security & workspace isolation
The boundary between two customers is enforced by the infrastructure, not by a filter in our application code. This is the short version; the full walkthrough has its own page.
Opaque, non-readable sessions
The browser holds an opaque handle, never a readable token. Where the platform supports it — the Secure Enclave on Apple, Device Bound Session Credentials on Chrome — the session is additionally bound to a key generated inside the device, so it cannot be renewed elsewhere.
Deny-by-default authorization
Every request is evaluated against a policy engine before any service runs. An action nobody wrote a policy for is refused, so a forgotten endpoint fails closed.
Credentials minted per request
Services hold no standing database keys. Each request runs under a short-lived credential scoped to exactly one workspace, which expires on its own within minutes.
Workspace fencing in the storage layer
That credential is restricted to its own workspace's partition of the database, so a read across workspaces is refused by the storage service itself — before our code is consulted.
A vault per business
Recordings and transcripts are stored in a dedicated, isolated store for each business, encrypted under a key created for that business alone — whose policy denies any principal carrying a different business's identity — with public access blocked and every key use logged.
A redaction boundary at the model
Caller identity is never placed in the prompt, in a token, or on a live dashboard socket. When the agent needs caller context it asks for it through an authenticated, scoped tool call.
Data, privacy & retention
What we collect, what the AI is allowed to be told, where it lives and when it goes away.
- What we hold
- Call audio and transcript, the caller's number, anything the caller chose to tell the agent, the resulting appointment or message, and the metadata of the call itself.
- What the model is told
- Your business configuration and the current time. Caller name, number, address, contact record, notes and VIP status are never placed in the prompt.
- What our logs hold
- Identifiers, timings, outcomes and status flags — enough to debug a call. Not the content of the conversation.
- Recording retention
- Governed by our Privacy Policy, which is the authority on how long we keep call media — see /legal/privacy. Ask us if you need a different schedule for your account.
- Encryption
- Encrypted in transit and at rest. Your database tables sit under keys we create and govern, with automatic rotation, and each business's recordings and transcripts under a key made for that business alone — not shared defaults — with object versioning on so media cannot be quietly overwritten.
- Deletion
- Close your account and your workspace's data is removed. Ask us for a specific caller's records and we will remove those.
Billing & usage
One metered thing: minutes. Everything else — teammates, integrations, security features, support — is included.
- Unit
- Minutes, drawn from a prepaid balance at a flat $0.49 per minute.
- Granularity
- Metered in seconds. A 43-second call costs 43 seconds; nothing is rounded up to a full minute.
- Funding
- Buy any amount as a one-time top-up, or set a monthly refill package (from 200 to 2,000 minutes) that tops the balance up on your billing date.
- Overage
- Past a package's included minutes you pay the same flat $0.49 per minute. There is no second, higher rate.
- Rollover
- Unused minutes carry into the following month and stay usable for twelve months from purchase.
- Shared balance
- Several businesses in one workspace can draw on a single balance, or any one of them can hold its own.
- Payments
- Handled by Stripe through their hosted fields. Card details do not pass through or rest on our servers.
Usage alerts
Notifications at 50%, 75%, 90% and 100% of your included minutes, plus a separate low-balance warning before the balance runs dry.
Spend cap
Set a hard ceiling on how far past your included minutes a month can go. At the cap, new calls go to your voicemail greeting instead of billing further.
Automatic top-up
Optionally refill the balance when it drops below a threshold you set, by an amount you set. Off unless you turn it on.
An auditable ledger
Each call writes one usage record against the balance, protected against double-counting on retry, and your history shows what was charged and which call it came from.
Numbers & call routing
Keep the number your customers already know, or take a new one. Either way you decide exactly when the agent answers.
- Keep your number
- Set conditional forwarding on your existing line so the agent picks up only when you don't — after hours, when you're on another call, or when nobody answers in a set number of rings.
- Carrier support
- Works with the major US carriers and cloud phone systems. We give you the exact forwarding code for yours and confirm it with one test call.
- New numbers
- Search and provision a local number in your area code from the dashboard.
- Coverage rules
- Choose 24/7 answering, business-hours-only, or after-hours-only, per business, in that business's own timezone.
- Live transfer
- The agent can hand a call to a person on a number you nominate when the conversation calls for it.
- Off switch
- One toggle stops the agent answering. Calls behave exactly as they did before you signed up.
Calendars & CRM
The agent books into the calendar you already use and writes the record into the system your team already lives in.
Connections are made through each vendor's own authorisation flow, so you grant access from inside their consent screen and can withdraw it from there at any time. We store the resulting access as an encrypted credential scoped to one business — never a password, and never a key typed into a text box.
- Calendars
- Google Calendar, Outlook, Calendly and Acuity — real availability read live, appointments written during the call.
- CRM & sales
- HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho.
- Field service
- Jobber.
- Bookings & payments
- Square.
- Real estate
- Follow Up Boss.
- Notifications
- Slack for call alerts.
- Not connected yet
- The dashboard shows a wider catalogue with the rest marked “coming soon” — those are roadmap, not available today. The eleven above are the ones you can connect right now. Ask us where a particular system sits.
- Sync direction
- Two-way: we read availability and existing records, and write back appointments, contacts, call outcomes and summaries.
Accounts & access control
Who on your team can see what, and how we make sure it's really them.
- Sign-in
- Continue with Google, Sign in with Apple, or an email and password.
- Passkeys
- Add a passkey from your account settings as an additional authentication method, backed by the same hardware that unlocks your device.
- Session security
- Sessions are bound to the device that created them and are held server-side, so there is no readable token for a script or an extension to steal.
- Roles
- Founder and staff roles, granted per business. A staff member sees the businesses they were added to and nothing else.
- Multiple businesses
- One login can hold several businesses. Switching between them re-scopes what the session can reach, rather than widening it.
- Removing someone
- Revoking access ends their sessions. There is no cached copy of the permission for them to keep using.
- Audit
- Administrative actions are recorded with who did what and when.
How we run the platform
The parts that decide whether a Tuesday afternoon deployment is uneventful.
Event-driven by default
Anything that doesn't have to happen during a call — scoring, syncing, notifying, reminding — runs on a queue with retries, backoff and a dead-letter, so a slow third party is a delay rather than a failure.
Configuration, not constants
Resource identifiers and operational limits are distributed to services as configuration at runtime rather than compiled in, so changing one is a configuration change, not a fleet-wide redeploy.
Rules enforced by machines
Automated checks in our build pipeline reject code that reaches around the isolation contract, hardcodes a resource name or ships without a test. A tired reviewer is not the last line of defence.
Fail fast, fail loud
Services refuse to start on a missing or placeholder configuration value rather than booting into a half-configured state, and alarms fire on the specific jobs whose silent failure would matter most.
Immutable machine images
Production servers boot from images built ahead of time and are never patched in place, so the running fleet matches a build we can reproduce exactly.
One deployable truth
Nothing reaches production that isn't committed and pushed first — the deployment tooling refuses otherwise — so what is running is always exactly what is in version control.
Consent & compliance
Outbound contact is the part of this product most able to get a business into trouble. It is built to make the careful thing the default.
- Consent record
- Messaging consent is captured and stored per contact as an append-only record, so what was agreed and when is a fact we can show you, not an assumption.
- Opt-out
- Standard reply keywords stop messages to that contact immediately, and the stop is recorded against the contact rather than held in memory.
- Outbound limits
- Automated outbound campaigns run inside configured contact limits and quiet hours rather than at whatever rate a queue can manage.
- Inbound calls
- A caller dialling your number is not an outbound contact, and nothing about answering them requires prior consent.
- Recording notice
- Every agent call opens with a notice that it is recorded, before recording begins. You control the greeting that follows. See the privacy section above.
- Subprocessors
- We use a small number of vendors for telephony, the voice and language models, and payments. They are listed with their roles in our Data Processing Addendum at /legal/dpa.
Support & reporting
Where to go when you need a person.
- General support
- support@oneearlybird.ai — questions about setup, forwarding, integrations and billing.
- Security inquiries
- security@oneearlybird.ai — first point of contact for architecture detail, threat model, data-handling specifics, subprocessor information and security reviews.
- Security reports
- report@oneearlybird.ai — dedicated mailbox for vulnerability disclosures. We read every report and respond to valid findings. Please give us a reasonable window before disclosing publicly.
- Security leadership
- Head of Security — Christopher L. Bentley (chris@oneearlybird.ai) leads the Platform & Product Security Team overseeing workspace isolation, security reviews and incident response.
- Service status
- Current platform status is published on our status page.