Why pay for a custom AI intake assistant when cheaper tools like Lead Friendly or Clio Grow exist?
Cheaper tools are built for every practice area, configured by you, and tested by nobody. A custom intake assistant from altomic.ai is built only for estate planning, probate and trust firms: the screening rules, the forbidden-answer set, and the escalation lines are written against your real inquiries, then tested for two weeks in shadow mode before it speaks to a client. If your firm has low inquiry volume, a general practice, or no after-hours gap, a cheaper tool is honestly the right choice — and we will say so on the blueprint call.
What the build fee actually buys
- A written constraint set — the sentences the assistant may say and the ones it can never say — locked against your firm's real, redacted inquiries, not a vendor template.
- Qualification logic for estate matters: asset minimum, county, matter type, whether probate has opened. General tools ask about budget, which is not the gate in this practice area.
- Two weeks of shadow mode: the assistant drafts every reply and sends nothing while your team approves and sends, so its real work is read before it speaks to a family.
- Bench-tested refusals: fee quotes, document interpretation, capacity questions and contested matters are refused and escalated, and the refusals are tested, not hoped for.
The honest math
- Estate and probate matters commonly carry fees in the low thousands to the mid five figures. One matter captured that would otherwise have gone to the firm that replied first covers months of retainer.
- The other side of the math is risk: one improvised answer about a document or an outcome from an untested chatbot costs more than any subscription.
- A published estimate tool lets a firm run its own intake numbers rather than accept a vendor's claim.
When a cheaper tool is the right choice
- Low inquiry volume: a handful of new inquiries a month does not justify a custom build.
- General practice: if estate and probate work is a small share of your matters, a generalist tool matches your intake.
- No after-hours gap: if your team already answers every inquiry within minutes during the hours families actually write, the problem this solves is not yours.
- No practice management system or named escalation contact: those are prerequisites, and without them nothing here works as designed.