We build the employee small businesses can't afford to hire.

Why we built this

The idea came from watching good businesses lose work they never knew about. A dentist mid-procedure can't take the call. A garage under a bonnet doesn't hear the phone. A salon owner with their hands in someone's hair isn't going to reply to a website enquiry until nine that night — and by then the person has booked somewhere else.

None of them had a receptionist problem. They had a coverage problem: the hours when work arrives and nobody is free to catch it. Hiring someone to sit and wait for those hours costs more than the work is worth, which is why almost nobody does it, which is why the enquiries keep evaporating.

What was actually needed was something that knew the business properly, answered instantly at any hour, could genuinely book the appointment rather than promise someone would call back, and cost less than a couple of hours of wages a month. That's Dave.

What we believe

These aren't values on a wall. Each one is a decision baked into the product, and you can check every one of them.

What we won't do

Knowing what a company refuses to do tells you more than its feature list.

• ✕We won't let Dave invent an answer. Not to seem clever, not to keep a conversation going. For allergen and safety questions he quotes the business's own words and tells the customer to confirm with the team — he will never tell anyone something is safe.
• ✕We won't charge you per message. Flat monthly price. Your busiest month costs exactly what your quietest one does.
• ✕We won't bill you for going over. Top-ups exist, but you approve every one. Nothing is taken automatically.
• ✕We won't lock you in. No annual contracts, no minimum term, no penalty for leaving, and your data comes with you.
• ✕We won't sell your data or train on it. Not to us, not to anyone. It isn't a revenue line we've chosen to forgo — it's simply not ours.
• ✕We won't sell you a plan you don't need. If answers are all you need, stay on the £24 one. We'd rather have a customer for three years than a bigger invoice this month.

Who you're actually dealing with

Dave on Duty is a small, independent British company. That has some real consequences worth being upfront about, good and bad.

The good: when you email support, the person reading it is the person who can fix it — there's no layer between you and the code. If you ask for something sensible, it can be in the product in days rather than in a roadmap for a year. And if you're near us in Hertfordshire, we will genuinely come and sit at your counter to set it up, because that's a thing a big platform can't do.

The honest part: we're not a hundred-person company with a 24/7 support desk, and we don't pretend to be. Support runs Monday to Friday, UK time. What you get instead is that nothing about your account is anonymous to us — we know which businesses use Dave and what they need him for.

The assistant itself runs on Claude, made by Anthropic — currently among the most capable AI models available. We didn't want to build a mediocre model of our own and call it AI; we'd rather build the part that matters for a small business — knowing the business properly, refusing to guess, and actually completing the booking — on top of the best engine we can get.

The name

DAVE stands for Digital Autonomous Virtual Employee. It started as a backronym and stuck, because it captures the thing we actually wanted: not another piece of software to license and configure, but someone you hire who then gets on with the job. You don't read a manual for a new receptionist. You tell them about the business and they start answering the phone.

He's also, deliberately, not a faceless "AI assistant". Customers talk to him more naturally when he has a name, and businesses on Dave Pro and above can rename him and give him their own face, because a salon's assistant shouldn't sound like a parts supplier's.

Try the product, not the pitch

The bot in the corner of this page is the actual product — the same engine we'd put on your website, trained on us instead of you. Ask it something awkward. Ask it something we haven't published anywhere and watch it admit it doesn't know, then offer to take your details. That behaviour is the whole company, in one exchange.