Est. New York City, 2026

The watchman
of the trades

Argus exists because of a simple, expensive fact: the best customers call at the worst hours, and almost nobody picks up.

It started with New York phone lines ringing out at night

Argus Answering was founded in New York City by Vincent Comaianni, after a stretch of research nobody in the industry liked hearing about: we called trade shops across Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx after hours, the way a homeowner with a dead AC would. Most of those calls went where yours probably go at 2 a.m.: voicemail, ring-out, or a full mailbox.

Every one of those calls was a customer holding cash, ready to book, listening to a robot voice ask them to leave a message. Homeowners hang up and dial the next company on Google, and the first line that picks up wins the job. The shops losing those calls were asleep, because they'd been on roofs and under boilers all day. The phone problem is a coverage problem.

So we built the missing night shift: a receptionist tuned to the trades that answers in seconds, triages like a dispatcher, books the routine work, wakes a human for the emergencies, and writes everything down. Then we put it on the hardest callers in the country first.

New York is our proving ground

If you can handle a New York City caller at 2 a.m., with the accent and the "just tell me when someone's coming" cutting you off mid-sentence, you can handle a caller anywhere. That was the bet behind starting here, and it's why we're comfortable answering nationwide now. Every shop's line, Bayside or Houston or Tampa, gets the receptionist that cut its teeth on the five boroughs.

Where we are now

Argus runs around the clock with intake tuned to HVAC, plumbing, and roofing, and every line is set to its shop's own service area and on-call rotation. We're signing our founding shops across the country now. Our team is based in New York and our demo line is public. Every escalation gets human review. The company motto is on the homepage and we mean it literally: Argus never sleeps.

Why the name

In Greek mythology, Argus was the watchman with a hundred eyes. While some of his eyes rested, the others stayed open, which made him the one guard who could never be caught sleeping. When something mattered enough to be watched day and night, the job went to Argus. That's the job we took: some of our eyes are always on your phone line, so yours don't have to be.

The watchman never slept. Neither do we.

The rules we won't break

We never pretend to be human

Argus is an AI receptionist and says so if a caller asks. The honest comparison is Argus versus your voicemail, and we'll win that one every night of the week without lying to anybody.

Safety outranks the sale

Gas smell, sparks, flooding: the caller is told to call 911 first, before anything that helps us. No exceptions, no matter what it does to the intake stats.

The off switch belongs to you

You learn how to turn Argus off before you learn anything else in setup. Your number stays yours, forwarding stays under your control, and canceling is one email with no retention script.

We put the guarantee in writing

The pilot is $199 flat, and if not one Argus-answered caller books work with you, it's free. If we don't think Argus fits your business, we say so on the first call and save everyone the month.

Everything is on the record

Every call recorded and every escalation logged. Reports you can read in two minutes. If something goes wrong, you'll hear it from us first, with the recording attached.

Judge it with your own ears