AESTARAestar / Docs / Guides / Getting set up
Getting set up
Setup is the part where Aestar learns your shop. It takes about fifteen minutes, it costs nothing, and no card is involved until you send Ava a real call.
A new shop starts at /onboarding. The wizard walks the same ground your office manager would cover on a first day: who you are, what you sell, what you charge, when you work, and how calls should be handled when nobody is free.
The six steps
They are tabs, not a tunnel. Every step has Save and continue and Skip for now, and you can jump back to any of them later.
- BusinessName, trade, timezone, address, phone, service area and your hours. If you already have a website, paste the address and use Analyze website — it reads your public page and fills in what it can find. It will tell you to confirm every field, because it does not invent prices.
- ServicesYour services with a duration and a starting price. This becomes your price book, and it is the only place Ava can get a number from. Aestar loads a starter list for your trade so you are editing rather than typing.
- TeamThe people in your shop — name, contact details, and what they are good at. Read Team members before you get the wrong idea about what this does.
- CalendarConnect Google Calendar, set your working hours, default job length, buffer between jobs and how far ahead someone can book. Google is the one that actually connects; Microsoft and iCloud are listed so you can see where they are, and they say so when you click them.
- AgentAva herself: her name, her voice, how fast she talks, her greeting, what she does after hours, and what she should always collect. The panel is headed Receptionist.
- ReviewA summary of the five steps above, and the button that finishes setup.
Two things the setup screen tells you itself, and we will repeat here. The starter price list is a starting point, not a quote — Ava will not read a price to a caller until you have looked at that line and kept it. And the Agent step does not put Ava on a phone line. It stores how she should behave. Getting her onto a real line is the separate go-live step below.
Setting up free, and going live
Building the shop and clicking around the app costs nothing and needs no card. That is deliberate: you should be able to see whether the thing is any good before you pay for it.
Going live is the separate step where Ava starts answering a real line. That starts a 30-day free trial with a card on file. Your first 100 answered minutes are free, the Shop OS fee is not charged during the trial, and cancelling before day 31 means you are never charged.
| What | Amount |
|---|---|
| Shop OS, the whole shop | $89 a month |
| Answered minutes included | 200 a month |
| Extra answered minutes | $0.25 each |
| Free trial when you go live | 30 days, first 100 minutes free |
| Shop number, if you want one from us | about $2.00 a month, passed through |
| Setup | Free |
| Extra seats for your crew | Free — there is no per-user charge |
Those numbers are read straight out of the billing code that Stripe uses, so this page cannot drift from what you are actually charged.
What to have ready
- Your current service prices, or at least the common ones.
- Your working hours, including whether you take weekend work.
- The zip codes or towns you will drive to.
- A decision about after-hours calls: message only, or urgent callbacks too.
If you would rather not do it alone, we will do it with you on a call. Ask for one and bring your price list.
Still stuck?
Ask Ava. She answers questions about Aestar itself — pricing, setup, what she does on a call — and she will tell you when something is not built yet.
Generated from the Aestar codebase at commit ceb26e3, last shipped September 23, 2026. Prices, statuses and screen names on this page are read from the running code, not typed by hand — so this page changes when the product does.