Most marketing agencies charging trades $500/mo are running three automations on your behalf and marking up the software 10x.
Here's the exact stack. Build it once this weekend and you're done.
What the agency is actually doing
Strip away the pitch deck and the monthly "strategy call" and almost every trade marketing agency is doing three things: following up with new leads fast, sending review requests after a job, and occasionally blasting a text to your dormant customer list.
That's it.
In practice, those three workflows account for roughly 80% of the measurable revenue lift their clients see. The other 20% is SEO content that takes 18 months to do anything and ad management with margins baked in.
You can automate all three. Today.
The stack: $0 + $20 + $30 = $50/mo
Zapier (free tier). The glue. Zapier's free plan gives you 100 tasks per month. For a solo operator running 20-40 jobs a month, that's enough to trigger automations when a new lead hits your CRM, your Google Sheet, or your intake form. No code. You're building "if this, then that" logic with dropdowns.
Resend ($20/mo). This is your email layer. Resend is a transactional email API built for developers, but their dashboard is simple enough that you don't need to be one. You get a real sending domain, high deliverability, and 50,000 emails a month at the $20 tier. Use it to send an instant confirmation the second a lead submits a form, a follow-up 24 hours later if they haven't booked, and a review request three days after job completion. Three emails. Set them up once.
Twilio ($10-30/mo depending on volume). SMS still crushes email for response rate in the trades. The real number is around 98% open rate on texts versus 25-35% on email. Twilio gives you a real local number, programmable SMS, and you pay per message — roughly $0.0079 per outbound text in the US. If you're sending 200 texts a month, that's under $2 in message costs on top of the ~$10 phone number fee. Budget $30 to be comfortable.
Total: $50/mo, often less.
The three workflows to build first
1. Instant lead response. New lead comes in via your website form or VettedCalls — Zapier fires, Twilio sends a text within 90 seconds: "Hey [Name], got your request. I'll call you back within the hour to confirm. — [Your name]." Speed to lead is the whole game. Contractors who respond in under 5 minutes convert at 4x the rate of those who respond in 30.
2. No-show follow-up. Lead filled out the form but never booked a call? Zapier checks your CRM or sheet 24 hours later. If status is still "new," Resend fires a plain-text email: "Still need a hand with [the problem they described]? Here's a link to grab a time." No design, no logo. Plain text converts better than HTML for this use case.
3. Review request. Job complete — you update the row in your sheet to "done." Zapier triggers a Twilio text three days later: "Hey [Name], hope the [job type] is holding up. If you have 60 seconds, a Google review means the world to a small business: [link]." In practice, this workflow alone adds 2-4 reviews per month without you lifting a finger. Over a year that's 24-48 reviews compounding your local ranking.
Why most trades never build this
The setup takes about four hours total if you've never touched these tools. That's the whole reason an agency can charge $500/mo — they're renting you their already-built version of this, plus their time to maintain it.
Once you've built it, maintenance is maybe 30 minutes a month.
The $450 difference every single month is $5,400 a year. That's a new truck payment. That's two apprentice weeks. That's yours.
The tools are not the hard part. Sitting down to do it is the hard part.
This week's move
Open a free Zapier account today, connect it to whatever form or spreadsheet you're already using to capture leads, and build just the instant-response Twilio text — nothing else.
Forward this
If another tradie you know is still losing leads to voicemail, send them VettedCalls.