Distance review

Distance (distance.so) is an AI sales and lead-capture platform for service businesses. Its agents answer incoming leads across phone, SMS, web chat, email, Facebook, Instagram and marketplaces like Yelp, Thumbtack and Angi (instantly, around the clock) then qualify the lead, take notes and push it toward a booked job. The pitch is speed-to-lead: in home services, the first company to respond usually wins the work, and most businesses cannot answer at 9pm on a Saturday. Distance can.

What Distance actually does

The core of the product is a set of AI agents, with Miles the sales agent as the flagship. Connect your channels, and every inbound message or call gets an immediate response in your business's voice. The agent asks the qualifying questions a good dispatcher would (what is the issue, where are you located, when do you need it done) and steers the conversation toward a booking. Alongside the sales agent there are voice, outreach and support agents, covering missed-call answering, follow-ups on quotes that went quiet, reminders and even nudges on unpaid invoices. Every conversation becomes a ticket with structured notes and actions, which can route to specific team members or sync to your CRM, so nothing lives only in a chat thread. Distance publishes trade-specific playbooks for HVAC, roofing, flooring, cleaning, pest control, locksmiths, garage door repair and junk removal, and claims its average customer saves more than 1,500 minutes a month (roughly fifty business days a year) on lead handling.

Key features

• 24/7 AI response across phone, SMS, web chat, email, Facebook, Instagram and Google Local Services Ads
• Marketplace coverage for Yelp, Thumbtack and Angi inquiries
• Lead qualification with trade-specific question flows and booking handoff
• Automatic follow-ups, reminders and invoice payment nudges
• Tickets with notes and actions for every conversation, routable to your team or CRM
• Industry playbooks for the major home service niches

Who it's for

Distance fits home service and field businesses that generate leads on multiple channels and lose a meaningful share of them to slow replies: the roofing company whose Thumbtack leads sit overnight, the HVAC shop whose office line goes to voicemail during peak season. It also suits property management, automotive and professional services teams listed on its industry pages. It is less relevant for businesses with a single lead source and a person already answering it, or for teams that specifically want only an AI phone receptionist and nothing else.

How it compares

LeadTruffle is the closest comparison (also built for home service pros, also unifying lead sources and qualifying with AI) and the choice tends to come down to channel coverage and how each handles your specific marketplaces. CloseBot comes from the agency world and is strong as an AI appointment setter inside existing CRM stacks, but it is less of a turnkey, channel-consolidating product for a trades business. Voice-first platforms like AI receptionists handle the phone superbly but leave Instagram DMs and Yelp quotes untouched; Distance's bet is that the text-based channels are where service leads increasingly arrive.

Verdict

Distance solves a real and expensive problem (leads that die waiting for a reply) and does it across more channels than most rivals. The trade-offs are typical of a young product: a shorter track record, a trial rather than a free tier, and a setup process that asks you to centralize your channels before the magic shows up. If your business misses calls and messages every week, the math on even a few recovered jobs per month is easy; trial it on your two busiest channels and measure booked jobs, not just response times.