AI receptionist for sole traders · UK
There's nobody to hand the phone to. So hand it to us.
Magixis is a 24/7 AI receptionist for UK sole traders and one-person businesses. It answers while you're working, quotes only from the prices you've given it, checks the caller is inside the area you cover, books the slot in your diary and texts the confirmation. It takes no payment, and it never claims to be you. From 70p a minute, no contract.
Hear it before you decide
One agent. One call.
Our own line is answered by the same agent your callers would get — 24/7. Ask it for a price it hasn't been given, or ask it straight out whether it's a person. Then let it book your 30-minute demo while you're still on the call.
- 24/7, 365 days
- ICO-registered · ZC223083
- UK/EU data storage · signed DPA
- No contract · from 70p a minute
The system
What does an AI receptionist do for a sole trader?
It answers while you're working, which is when the phone rings. It states the service and the price from your own list, checks the postcode against the area you cover, books into your diary and texts the confirmation. Anything you haven't priced or promised becomes a callback on your list, with the caller's words attached.
Picked up while both hands are busy
Two rings, your business name, and it says it's answering for you. Mid-job, driving, in an appointment, or eating at half eight: the caller gets answered rather than a beep and a promise to ring back.
Your prices, your patch, your diary
It quotes the service at the price you set, checks where the caller is against the area you cover, offers real slots and confirms by SMS. No payment taken, no deposit, no card details asked for.
Tonight's paperwork, already done
Who rang, what they wanted in their own words, the price quoted, what's booked, what it refused, and the callbacks waiting on you — written down while they're still talking. Nothing to type up at nine.
Where the joins go
Answering costs you the job you're on.
Every business with staff can put the phone somewhere. A salon has a floor, a gym has a building, a firm has a colleague two desks away. When you work on your own, answering and working draw on the same pair of hands — so the phone doesn't cost you time you had spare, it costs you the job in front of you.
Answer it and stop. Ignore it and lose it.
You put the tools down, wipe your hands, take a name, lose your place, and start again — four times before lunch. Leave it ringing and the caller rings the next name on the list, because a new customer has no reason to wait for you.
answer · pause · restart
There is no “we”
No rota, no colleague, nobody to hand it to for an afternoon. A bug, a funeral, a week you can't work, and the business shuts with you — and the phone, the one part of it that could have stayed open, shuts too.
no rota · no cover
They're ringing a person, not a company
Your name is the business. Nobody expects a switchboard, so the answer has to be honest about what it is: answering for you, quoting only what you've priced, and never pretending to be you. Get that wrong and you've spent the trust the number was carrying.
a person · not a brand
What happens
62%
of calls to small businesses never reach a live person.
Why ring-back fails
86%
of calls from unknown numbers go unanswered — so the ring-back you make from the van at seven finds nobody in.
How most of the country trades · UK
4.3m
UK private-sector businesses employ nobody but the owner — three in four of the 5.7 million total.
How the agent handles a one-person business
Two illustrative transcripts.
Scripted examples of how the agent handles these calls, not recordings of real callers. The trader, the business, the customers, the services and the prices are invented. Bramble is a mobile dog groomer here, but the shape of the call is the same for a gardener, a photographer or a man with a van.
Wednesday 11:40 · mid-groom, both hands on a dog · new customer
New job
AGENTBramble Mobile Dog Grooming — I'm answering for Ellie while she's working. What can I do for you?
CALLERI've a cockapoo that needs a full groom. How much, and when could she come?
AGENTA full groom on a cockapoo is £55 on Ellie's list — bath, dry, clip, nails and ears, about two hours at the van. Whereabouts are you?
CALLERHeaton Moor. SK4.
AGENTSK4 is inside the area Ellie covers, so there's nothing added for travel. She has Thursday the 21st at 9.30am, or Monday the 25th at 1pm.
CALLERThursday. Do you need a deposit to hold it?
AGENTNo — I don't take payments or card details, and Ellie doesn't ask for a deposit. You settle with her on the day. Can I take your name?
CALLERNadia Kowalski. Does she need anything from me?
AGENTSomewhere to park within a lead's length of your door, that's all she asks. So: Thursday the 21st, 9.30am, full groom, £55. Texting you the time and the price now, and it's on Ellie's list before she finishes today.
New customer · full groom Thu 21st 09:30 · £55 from Ellie's own price list · SK4 checked against her configured area · no deposit, no card details · SMS sent · on her list, because there's nobody else to route it to
Friday 16:05 · outside the patch, and a price nobody has set
Refused
CALLERHiya — is that Ellie?
AGENTNo. I answer the phone for Bramble Mobile Dog Grooming when Ellie's working, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I can quote from her list, book a slot and take everything down for her. What's it about?
CALLERA collie that's badly matted — hasn't been done in about a year. And a cat that wants doing as well. We're over in Glossop.
AGENTTwo things I can't do with that. Glossop is outside the area Ellie's given me, so I'm not able to book it. And she doesn't groom cats, so there's nothing on the list for that at all.
CALLERGive me a rough price for the dog, then, and I'll drive over to her.
AGENTI can't. De-matting isn't priced on her list — it depends on the coat, and she's the one who has to look at it. I'm not going to invent a figure or commit her to a time she hasn't offered.
CALLERYou must have some idea.
AGENTI've an idea what a full groom costs, and that isn't what you're describing. What I can do is put it in front of her exactly as you've said it — collie, matted, about a year, plus a cat, and Glossop — and she'll decide whether she'll travel and what she'd charge. She rings her own callbacks, so it'll be her, this evening or tomorrow morning.
CALLERGo on then.
AGENTNothing quoted and nothing held, so you're not committed either. Is this number the best one for her?
Outside the configured area · service not offered · no price quoted, because none exists · no slot held, nothing committed · agent said what it was when asked · logged as Ellie's own callback, this evening or tomorrow morning
Your CRM, written by the call
Ten fields you'd otherwise be writing up at nine tonight.
Every plan includes the Magixis CRM, and the record fills itself in while the caller is still on the line. There is no colleague to route to, so the last two fields are the ones that matter: what the agent wouldn't do, and what's waiting on you. It holds nothing that could take money.
ContactName & mobile
ContactNew or returning
JobWhat they asked for, in their words
WherePostcode, checked against your area
MoneyPrice quoted from your own list
MoneyNothing taken · no card, no deposit
DiarySlot booked
ArrivalParking, access, who'll be in
RefusedWhat it wouldn't quote or commit
CallbackOn your list, with a time
Beyond reception
Every call becomes a customer record, and every refusal becomes a list.
Magixis isn't only the voice that answers. From the first ring it builds a CRM in your name, so you can see what people ring you for, what they asked for that you don't offer, how much work came from outside the area you cover, and how much of the week arrived while you were on a job.
01 · CRM from call data
Caller → customer record, with the ask attached
Every caller becomes a contact from their first call — names and numbers masked by default — and builds toward a view of what they enquired about, what they booked, and what they rang back about. No notebook, no typing up.
02 · Both hands stay on the job
Answered at 11:40 without you stopping
The call that used to cost you twenty minutes and your place in the job now costs you nothing until you choose to read it. Bookings land in the diary as they happen; the rest waits on a list you work when the day's finished.
03 · Every call reviewable
Transcript, recording, and what was refused
A full log of who rang, what was quoted, what was booked, and what the agent declined — which matters most on the calls where the right answer was “I can't”. Cold sales calls are flagged and excluded from the numbers. You can correct the agent, and every correction is logged.
04 · 24/7 human handoff
A person for the calls you'd rather a person took
You have no colleague to escalate to, so anything you choose routes instead to a person working 24/7 who books into your diary. You keep authority to approve, override and reassign every time.
05 · One login, and it's yours
The whole business on one screen
Diary, calls, contacts and callbacks in one place, on the phone in your pocket. Access is capability-based rather than job-title-based, sensitive actions need a logged reason, and every consequential action sits in a tamper-evident audit log.
06 · Commercials
A posted rate per minute, and nothing in a quiet month
From 70p a minute, posted publicly. Lite has no setup fee and no subscription, so a fortnight of rain costs you nothing at all. Every price is on the pricing page.
The alternatives
How does Magixis compare with a telephone answering service?
A one-person business weighing this up is usually choosing between voicemail, a human answering service such as Moneypenny, and an AI receptionist. The short version: an answering service passes on what the caller wanted; Magixis prices it from your list and books it. The detail, like for like:
| Magixis | Human answering service | Voicemail | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Answering hours | 24/7, 365 days — including the evening you spend writing up the day | Typically 9am–5pm Mon–Fri; Moneypenny lists 24/7 as an add-on from £35/month | Always on; most callers hang up |
| What the caller gets | The service and price from your own list, the area checked, a slot booked — SMS confirmation | A message taken — typically up to five agreed data fields — passed on by email or text | A beep |
| A call while both your hands are full | Answered, quoted and booked without you stopping the job | Answered, then relayed to you — you still make the call back | Rung back that evening, when 86% of unknown-number calls go unanswered |
| When the caller asks if it's you | It says what it is — answering for your business, not you, and it won't pretend otherwise | The caller knows they've reached an answering service, which is fair enough | Obvious, and the caller has already dialled somebody else |
| A price you've never set | Refused on the call, nothing invented, nothing committed; logged as your callback with the caller's own words | Written down and passed on | — |
| Illness, holiday, a week you can't work | Your own words read out, enquiries taken and booked from the date you choose | Cover continues if the plan covers it — the messages pile up for your return | A full mailbox |
| A month with no calls | Nothing at all on Lite — £1.35 a minute, no subscription, no setup fee | The monthly plan continues; Moneypenny's smaller message-taking plans carry a three-month minimum | Free |
| What you get afterwards | A CRM record written on the call: what they wanted, where they are, what was quoted, what was booked, what was refused | An email or SMS to action yourself | A recording to ring back |
| Contract | None — cancel any month | Moneypenny's smaller message-taking plans carry a three-month minimum | — |
Moneypenny details from moneypenny.com/uk/message-taking-service — hours, 24/7 add-on pricing, data fields and minimum terms as published there; UK rates are not published. Ring-back figure: Hiya, State of the Call 2026. Last checked: 13 August 2026.
Moneypenny is a well-regarded service, and a human PA taking messages in office hours is a perfectly good answer for some businesses. Magixis is for the ones where the same pair of hands does the answering and the work.
Pricing
How much does it cost?
Calls run from 70p a minute on multi-site Command. Lite is the plan for a one-person business: £1.35 a minute, no setup fee, no subscription, nothing at all in a month when nobody rings, and you set it up yourself the same day. Pro (£995 setup, then £99 a month plus 85p a minute) only beats it past roughly 200 minutes a month. No allowances, no overage, no contract.
Who's behind the line
Manchester-born. Built for the whole UK.
Magixis is a UK company, founded in Manchester in 2026. A phone line has no radius: a practice in Truro gets the same two-ring answer as one in M2. What travels with every call is the paperwork — ICO registration, UK/EU data storage, a signed DPA — all in writing on the trust page.
CompanyMagixis Limited · UK
HQManchester, M2
CoverageUnited Kingdom
ICOZC223083
Companies House17372370
Before you call · sole traders
One pair of hands, two jobs that both need them.
Here is the line this page draws, in one sentence: our plumbers, electricians and HVAC pages are about the job — emergency categories, regulatory duties, parts, day rates, the diary of a firm that might have two vans — and this page is about there being only one of you. That is a different constraint, and it is the one that decides how your phone behaves. A groomer, a gardener, a driving instructor, a mobile therapist, a photographer, a man with a van: the trade varies, and the arithmetic doesn’t. Answering the phone and doing the work draw on the same pair of hands, so an answered call is a paused job and an unanswered one is usually a lost one. If your trade has its own page, read that one; the two aren’t alternatives, and plenty of people want both.
It is worth knowing how ordinary this is. The Department for Business and Trade’s Business population estimates 2025, published on 2 October 2025, puts 4.3 million of the UK’s 5.7 million private-sector businesses — three in four — as employing nobody aside from the owners, and counts 3.2 million sole proprietorships, 57% of the whole population and the most common legal form there is. Three million of those sole proprietorships employ nobody at all. Those are UK-wide figures, and the release has per-nation counts if you want them. Two cautions, because the blogs run these together: DBT defines a sole proprietorship as an unincorporated business run by one self-employed person, which is a narrower thing than “businesses with no employees” and a different measure again from the ONS count of self-employed people. And the release is labelled official statistics in development, with the unregistered-business part estimated from survey data rather than counted, so treat it as a good estimate rather than a headcount.
The commercial case is the bit nobody sells you, so we’ll say it plainly: there is no “we”. There is no rota to cover a bad week, no colleague to take the afternoon, and when you stop, the business stops. The phone is the only part of it that could carry on, and it is also the part that decides whether next month has any work in it. That is why Lite is the honest recommendation here rather than the cheap one: £1.35 a minute, no setup fee, no subscription, and nothing at all in a month when nobody rings, so the line costs you money only in the weeks it is earning you some.
Then the hard question, which we are not going to dodge: won’t your customers know? If they ask, yes — because the agent tells them. It answers for your business, says so, doesn’t use your name as its own and won’t claim to be you when somebody asks outright. The claim we make is narrower and more useful: a caller who gets a price, a date and a text has been served better than a caller who gets your voicemail while you are mid-job. Around that, the boundaries are firm. It quotes no price you haven’t set, commits to no arrival time you haven’t offered, and gives no tax, legal, insurance, employment, licensing or trade advice of any kind. It never suggests you are qualified, insured, registered, vetted or accredited, and Magixis claims no trade-body membership or accreditation for itself either. It takes no payment or deposit and holds no card details. If what you run is a practice rather than a trade — a consultant, a coach, a counsellor, one named diary that clients book into — then the constraint is authority rather than hands, and our personal receptionist page is written for that instead. Everything a caller says is masked by default, stored encrypted in EU regions and covered by a signed DPA, with recordings kept 30 days and transcripts 90 days unless you ask for different. See how a call is handled, how we treat caller data in GDPR for AI voice agents, what it costs on the pricing page, or browse the full reception range.
Sources: DBT, Business population estimates for the UK and regions 2025: statistical release (UK-wide, published 2 Oct 2025, official statistics in development) · 411 Locals, 2016 · Hiya, State of the Call 2026. Last updated: 15 August 2026
FAQ · Sole traders
The questions one-person businesses ask.
If your question isn't here, put it to our agent on a live call — it can probably answer.
Calls run from 70p a minute. Lite is the plan for a one-person business: £1.35 a minute, no setup fee, no subscription, and nothing at all in a month when nobody rings. Pro — £995 setup, then £99 a month plus 85p a minute — only works out cheaper past roughly 200 minutes a month, which most sole traders never see. Multi-site Command is 70p a minute. No allowances, no overage, no contract — the full pricing comparison is here.
A human answering service takes a message and sends it on; standard cover typically runs office hours, with 24/7 as a paid add-on and a minimum contract on the smaller plans. Magixis quotes from the price list you gave it, checks the postcode against the area you cover, books the slot and texts the confirmation. A message means ringing back tonight. A booking is already done. The like-for-like table is above.
If they ask, yes — and it tells them. The agent answers for your business and says so: it doesn't use your name as its own, doesn't claim to be you, and won't pretend when a caller asks outright. What it claims is that somebody picked up. A caller who gets a price, a date and a text does better than one who gets your voicemail while you're mid-job.
Read the trades page first. Our plumbers, electricians and HVAC pages are about the job: emergency categories, regulatory duties, parts, day rates and a diary that might have two vans in it. This page is about there being one of you — no colleague, no rota, nobody to hand the phone to. If the work has its own page, start there. If working alone is the constraint, start here.
No. It quotes only prices on your list, offers only slots you've opened, and commits to no arrival time you haven't configured. Ask it something you've never priced and it says so and logs a callback. It gives no tax, legal, insurance, employment, licensing or trade advice, takes no payment or deposit, holds no card details, and never claims you're qualified, insured, registered, vetted or accredited.
On your list, because there's no colleague to warm-transfer to. Anything the agent won't decide becomes a callback task carrying the caller's own words, the time, and what was refused — so you work a list at six o'clock rather than a voicemail box. If you'd rather a person took the awkward ones, our own team works 24/7 and books into your diary.
The line keeps answering, which makes it the one part of a one-person business that can stay open when you stop. You set what it should say: no availability this week, enquiries taken and booked from a date you choose, or urgent work declined outright in your own words. It states your position and nothing beyond it, and everything it takes is waiting for you when you're back.
Yes. Caller names and numbers are masked by default, data is stored encrypted in EU regions, and access is capability-based with a logged reason for sensitive actions. Recordings are kept 30 days and transcripts 90 days by default, with per-client overrides. We sign a DPA and publish our sub-processor list on the trust page. The agent holds no card details and no bank details.
The same day, on Lite. You set it up yourself from a link we send: your services and prices, the area you cover, your working hours, and the days you're not available. Forward your number when you're ready and keep it — nothing changes about the number printed on every card and every job you've done. The setup, step by step.