Before you sign.
The ten questions worth asking any vendor.

Can I speak with three current customers?

No, and I would be skeptical of any vendor my size who says yes: hand-picked references from a young company mean at least one is a friend doing a favor. What you get instead proves more than a coached phone call.

• What I will give you instead: call (470) 467-7724 right now and try to break the product. That is the actual system, not a reference reading a script somebody coached them on.
• When you talk to us, you are talking to the people who build it. There are two of us on the phone: Mike (founder, builds it) and Jay (partner, works the sales side and knows the product cold).
• When I have clients willing to be named, this answer changes and their names go here. If you are reading this and it still says no, it is still no.

The straight version: early clients get my cell number, a rate fixed for six months with sixty days written notice before it ever moves, and a build I care about more than I will care about my hundredth.

Can you show me recordings from a real client, with permission?

Not yet, for the same reason as the first question. And while I am here, I am correcting something on my own site.

• The recording on the Hank page is labeled "real call, unedited." It is real and it is unedited. But it is a prospect calling my demo line, not a client's customer calling a client's line. Those are different claims and I should have drawn the line more clearly.
• What I will not do is publish a client's customer's phone call to sell to you. That caller called a plumber about a leak. They did not consent to becoming marketing.
• When there are client recordings worth hearing, they get shared one to one, redacted, with that client's written permission. Not posted on a website.

What you can do instead costs nothing and proves more: call (470) 467-7724. Interrupt it. Ask for a price it does not have. Ask it point blank whether it is a person. A clip I picked is a curated clip. A call you place is evidence.

What happens if the AI books an appointment incorrectly?

It will happen. Here is what stops most of it, and then here is what actually happens on the day it gets through anyway.

• What prevents it: Hank books inside the windows you give it and holds back the slots you protect. When it does not know an answer, it says so, takes the question down verbatim, and texts it to you instead of guessing. A receptionist that invents a price or promises a Saturday you do not work costs more than the call was worth.
• When it happens anyway: every call is recorded and transcribed, so there is a record of exactly what was said. You are never arguing about what your own receptionist promised somebody.
• You text me. I pull the call, find the rule that let it through, and change the rule. Behavior fixes are usually same hour, because they are text, not code.
• What I do not cover: the cost of the truck roll. No AI receptionist vendor covers that, and my liability is capped in the terms like everybody else's. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not read their own contract.
• What I do cover: if the same category of mistake happens twice after I have told you in writing that it is fixed, that month is on me, credited in full. That is my failure to tune, not yours to absorb, and it is written into my terms as Section 16 rather than left as a promise on a sales page.

If that trade is not acceptable for your business, do not sign. It is the honest shape of the deal, and it is the same shape at every vendor. The difference is whether they tell you before or after.

What is your average uptime?

I am not going to give you a number I cannot back. There is not a meaningful annual uptime figure to publish yet, and a "99.99%" claim from any vendor who cannot show you the status pages behind it should make you more suspicious, not less.

• The public Hank demo configuration checked on September 2, 2026 uses Twilio for the phone connection, Deepgram for speech recognition, Anthropic's Claude for responses, and ElevenLabs for the voice. Vapi coordinates that conversation. Our backend connects the call to business actions and records; the portal is served on Vercel. This describes the public demo path, not every product or customer configuration. Provider uptime alone does not establish end-to-end reliability.
• Every one of those has a public status page and a real operating history. None of them is me with a server under a desk.
• The reliability fact that matters most is structural, not a promise. Your calls reach Hank because you forwarded your line to it. Un-forwarding takes about sixty seconds and your phone rings at your desk exactly like it did before. You are never stuck inside a broken system waiting on me to answer.

Starting with the August 2026 figure, posted in early September, I publish the previous month's real uptime on this page every month. When there are twelve of them, this answer stops being an explanation and becomes a number.

Who provides support after hours?

The two of us. Mike and Jay. That cuts both ways and you should hear both sides before you decide it is a feature.

• The good side: you text a cell phone belonging to somebody who built your system. No tier one, no ticket queue, nobody who has to escalate to somebody who has to escalate to somebody.
• The bad side: two people still sleep. So here is the rule we hold ourselves to. Hank is down or answering wrong: text either of us and we answer as soon as we see it — often late at night, because that is how a two-person shop works. What we will not do is promise you a staffed overnight desk we do not have. The commitment we will put in a contract is one business day. Annoying but not costing you calls: next business day. Billing, tuning requests, "can it also do this": next business day.
• The "we will respond within one business day" line on the contact page is for people sending us a message about buying. It is not the support commitment for a client whose phone is not being answered. Those are different promises and we have separated them.
• What does not depend on us being awake: the escape hatch. Un-forward your line and your calls ring your phone. You never need to reach us in order to get your own phone back.

How quickly are bugs typically fixed?

Usually same day, because there is no queue in front of you and no product manager to convince. But "usually" is doing work in that sentence, so here is the shape of it.

• Rule and behavior problems, meaning Hank quoted a price you do not charge, booked outside your hours, or mangled your company name: usually within the hour. Those are wording changes, not deploys.
• Integration breaks, meaning your calendar API changed or a webhook stopped firing: same day or next, depending on whether the fix is mine or a vendor's.
• Something I have never seen before: you get an honest "I do not know yet, here is the workaround" the same day. I would rather tell you that than invent an ETA to make you feel better.
• I hear about most of it before you do. Error alerting fires to me when integrations fail, and I read every transcript from your first week personally.

What I cannot promise: that a bug inside Twilio, Anthropic, or Deepgram gets fixed on my schedule. When the fault is upstream I will tell you it is upstream, send you their status page, and tell you what I am doing to route around it in the meantime.

Can I export all my prompts and workflows if I leave?

Yes. Ask this exact question of every vendor you are considering, and notice which ones will not answer it in writing.

• On request, at any time, leaving or not: your call recordings, transcripts, and structured summaries as actual files, not a screen you have to photograph.
• Your persona, in readable text. That is the plain-English instruction set that makes Hank behave the way it does for your shop: your hours, your services, your prices, your emergency definitions, your escalation list, and every custom rule I wrote for you.
• What you cannot take with you, said now rather than discovered later: Hank itself. The character, the voice, the system, the code. That is my product, the same way the car in your driveway is yours and the design is Toyota's. Your persona document tells another vendor exactly what to build. It does not let them run my system.
• A tension in my own pricing, flagged rather than hidden: my published terms say that if you cancel and come back later, a new $1,500 build is required, because I re-tune from scratch. If you left with your export, that rebuild is genuinely less work, and I will price it that way. Ask me and I will quote it honestly instead of charging you full freight for work I do not have to redo.

Who owns the phone number, the transcripts, and the automation assets?

Line by line, because "we value your data" is not an answer. This list is what is true, and where my own site said something different, I changed my site rather than this page.

• Your existing business number: yours, always was, and it never moves. Hank works by forwarding, which is exactly why cancelling is un-forwarding.
• The Hank number, meaning the new line Twilio provisions during your build: it sits on my Twilio account today. In practice most shops never publish it, they forward to it, so it is moot. If it is not moot for you, I will port it to your own Twilio account, free, on request. Get that in writing before you sign if you plan to put it on a truck.
• Your recordings, transcripts, and summaries: yours. I hold them as your processor, not their owner. 90 day default retention, longer if you ask, deleted whenever you say so.
• Your persona, hours, prices, service list, and escalation rules: yours. That is your business written down.
• Hank, meaning the character, the voice, the code, the system: mine. Licensed to you while you are a client, not sold to you.
• Anything on your side I connect to, meaning your CRM, your calendar, your Jobber or ServiceTitan account: obviously yours, and nothing of yours leaves with me.

One correction while I am being precise. My about page has said "you own what I build" since I was doing project consulting. For Hank that is not accurate, and the list above is what is true. I changed the page.

How are customer recordings secured?

All of the following is in the privacy policy, in writing, where you can hold me to it rather than take my word on a sales page.

• Encrypted in transit over TLS and encrypted at rest in the database. Row level security, so one client's calls are not reachable from another client's session. Admin actions logged. Two-factor available on the portal. Rate limiting on public endpoints.
• Recordings and transcripts are kept 90 days by default. Longer if your business needs longer, deleted on request.
• Every call opens with a recording disclosure before anything substantive is said. Georgia is a one-party consent state, but the disclosure runs on every call regardless, because your callers are not all in Georgia.
• Nobody trains AI models on your calls. Not me, and not Anthropic, whose no-training term is contractual on their side rather than a hope on mine.
• Every vendor that touches your data is named in the privacy policy with a link to their own: Twilio, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Anthropic, Supabase, Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify, Resend, Stripe. If I add a new one, the policy says so 30 days before it takes effect.

What I will not claim: I am not SOC 2 certified. What I will claim, because it is true: I will sign Business Associate Agreements for the healthcare practice software I build and support, for the right engagement. Hank is not that product. Hank is a phone line, it is not the surface a BAA covers here, and protected health information should not go over it. If you are a medical practice, say so on the first call and I will tell you straight which of the two you actually need and whether I can serve you. I would rather lose the sale than fail your audit.

What happens if your business closes?

The real risk in buying from a small company, and the question I would ask first. No amount of marketing copy answers it, so here is a commitment instead. Every item below is written into Section 16 of my terms of service, carved out of the liability cap, and set to survive the end of your account. It is not a promise on a page I can quietly edit.

• 30 days written notice before service ends, in any scenario where I am able to give notice.
• An export package inside those 30 days: every recording and transcript, your full persona and rule set in readable text, your hours and escalation configuration, and a written handoff describing how your setup was wired, so the next vendor rebuilds it instead of guessing at it.
• The Hank number ported to your own Twilio account, free, on request.
• No exit fee, and no charge for a month I do not finish serving.
• If I cannot operate at all, the export package is the thing that has to reach you, so I am setting up a named person outside the business with the client list, a path to the credentials, and written instructions for what to send. That is not a legal instrument, and I will name the arrangement here once it is in place rather than describe it before it is.

And the structural point, which matters more than any promise above it. Your calls reach Hank because you forwarded them there. The day Matthews Automation stops existing, you un-forward your line and your phone rings at your desk exactly like it did the week before you met me. You are inconvenienced. You are not out of business. That is the entire reason this is built as a forward instead of a number swap.