The terms, in plain English

Who you're dealing with

On The Blower is a UK answering service operated as a sole trader business. Questions, problems, cancellations: email hello@ontheblower.uk and you'll get a reply from a human.

What you're buying

An AI phone assistant plus your number. Plans: Answer at £20 a month including 45 answered minutes, then 30p a minute; Busy at £30 a month including 150 answered minutes, then 25p a minute; Pro at £70 a month including 400 answered minutes, then 20p a minute. There is no setup fee and no joining fee. New accounts get Building an assistant and ringing it to hear how it answers are free and need no card. Your first payment is taken when you go live, and it is what makes your number start answering; you can cancel at any time. Included minutes reset each billing month, and unused minutes do not carry over. Minutes only count while the assistant is actually on a call; calls you pick up yourself, wrong numbers and instant hang-ups don't count. A single call is capped at 10 minutes. Texts your assistant sends (call alerts to you, follow-ups to your customers, both optional and off unless you switch them on) are 7p each. Alerts by app notification and by email are free. Texts are one-way notifications sent under the "OnTheBlower" sender name rather than a number; recipients can't reply to them. You can switch plans any time from the next billing month.

Call credit, and why you can never owe us money

Anything beyond your included minutes, and any texts, comes out of prepaid call credit. You can add credit whenever you like, from £10, and we suggest starting with some when you join so the phone keeps answering if you have a busier month than usual. We never bill usage after the fact, so your bill simply cannot run away from you. Credit never expires — unlike your monthly included minutes, it stays on your account until you use it. Credit is money rather than minutes: it is spent at your plan's per-minute rate on the day of the call, so if you move to a plan with a different rate, the same credit covers more or fewer minutes than it did.

We nudge you by app notification and email well before you run low. You can choose to have your credit topped up automatically: you set the balance it happens at, how much is added, and — importantly — a monthly cap. That cap is a hard ceiling on what we can ever charge your card automatically; when it is reached we tell you rather than carrying on. If you turn auto top-up off, the phone simply stops answering until your month renews or you add credit yourself. You are only ever charged for credit you have chosen to buy.

We do not cut off a call that is already in progress. If a call runs past your credit we finish it and absorb the cost rather than hang up on your caller. We will tell you, and you top up when it suits.

Cancelling

No contract. Cancel any time by email; your service runs to the end of the month you've paid for and nothing more is charged. Any remaining call credit stays usable until your service ends, and whatever is left after that is not refunded, so we'll remind you of your balance when you cancel and you're welcome to use it up.

When you cancel we keep your phone number reserved for 30 days in case you come back, then release it. Tell us inside that window if you want to port it somewhere else and we'll help.

Refunds

If the service breaks and we can't fix it within a reasonable time, we'll refund the affected period. If you're unhappy in your first 14 days, email us and we'll refund your first month, we'd rather part friends.

Your side of the deal

Phone numbers are regulated, so we need three promises from you: the details you give us (business name, address, contact) are accurate and kept up to date; the service is used for lawful business purposes only; and if a carrier or regulator requires us to confirm who a number is allocated to, we can share those details with them. If a number is being used for anything dodgy, fraud, harassment, misleading callers, we can suspend it immediately while we sort it out with you.

The sensible stuff

Your assistant answers based on the information you give it, keep your prices, hours and straight-through rules up to date. It never gives quotes you haven't approved. Call summaries and messages belong to you; we don't sell or share your data, and we only keep what's needed to run the service. The AI is very good but not a human, for anything safety-critical, the straight-through transfer puts callers directly on to you.