Make it better
The upgrade ladder, in order. Every rung shows its list price and what it buys — measured on your own calls wherever a measurement exists. Nothing here is charged without its own confirmation step.
1Real calls on Twilio's trial credit
doneYour first real phone calls, funded by Twilio's ~$15 signup credit. Trial rules allow calls only to numbers you verify — perfect for testing on yourselves.
Done — telephony is connected.
2Paid Workers AI (Cloudflare)
your next stepThe AI that answers your calls runs on Cloudflare's edge GPUs, next to your Worker. Its free tier has a daily ceiling that would make an agent go quiet mid-day — on the Gauge platform account that is our bill to keep paid, not yours.
Capacity in plain numbers: the free tier is good for ≈ 12–16 calls/day; paid removes the ceiling entirely at ≈ a fraction of a cent per call.
Cloudflare list — $0.011 per 1,000 neurons past the free daily allocation
Nothing for you to do — this one is ours to keep paid.
3Upgrade Twilio out of trial
ready when you areCall any number, drop the trial announcement before every call, and unlock Media Streams — which switches the agent to the streaming engine.
Today every answer waits ~3.3s (p50, measured on a real tenant's calls) for the phone network to decide you stopped talking. The streaming engine cuts that to ~0.7s.
Twilio list — $1.15/month per US number + $0.014/min US outbound$0.02/call · ≈ $1.39/mo (at 1.7 min/call, 10 calls in the last 30 days)
Add a payment method in the Twilio Console, then buy your first number here.
4Streaming engine (realtime answers)
laterThe agent listens and speaks over a live audio stream with barge-in — the conversation stops having gaps at all. Runs Cloudflare-native, no vendor keys.
Removes the measured 3.3s wait on every turn of every call.
provider list — from $0.10 / minute of duplex audio (plus paid telephony)$0.17/call · ≈ $1.72/mo (at 1.7 min/call, 10 calls in the last 30 days)
Flips on in Settings once Twilio is out of trial.
5Teach it your industry's words
doneThe phone's speech recognition is biased toward the words you give it. Trade terms, product names, local place names — entered as callers SAY them — stop being mis-heard, and a mis-heard word is a turn the agent answers wrongly. Free, and often worth more than any paid upgrade.
29 terms in this workspace's vocabulary — every one is a word the recogniser will no longer guess at.
Add terms under Knowledge → Business profile → Industry vocabulary.
6A local number in every market
laterPeople answer local numbers. One number per city or country, rotated least-recently-used with per-number daily caps and automatic resting when an answer rate collapses — so growing volume never reads as spam.
Twilio list — $1.15/month per US number (EU numbers run $1–5)$0.02/call · ≈ $1.39/mo (per number, at list price)
Add numbers per market under Voice Agent → Numbers.
7Stronger models (Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock)
ready when you areRuns the deep tier — qualification, FAQ answers, summaries — on a frontier model with your own key. The fast spoken path stays on the edge, so latency does not change.
Anthropic list (Haiku 4.5, your key) — $1/M input + $5/M output tokens$0.009/call · ≈ $0.09/mo (at 1.7 min/call, 10 calls in the last 30 days)
Add a provider key in Settings → AI providers.
Why this runs better than the alternatives
· Your own isolated stack: every client runs their own Worker and their own database — not a row in someone else's. Your data never shares a table with another business.
· The brain runs where the call lands: models execute on Cloudflare's edge GPUs in the same network that carries the call — no round trip to a distant cloud between hearing and answering.
· The call's memory lives near the caller: each live call gets a coordinator placed close to the phone network's entry point, so every turn saves the distance twice.
· The speech stack is on the same metal: voice (Aura), transcription (Nova-3) and turn detection (Flux) run on Workers AI — no third-party vendor between the caller and the agent unless you choose one.
· Free tier is real: the platform, simulated calls and the website agent run on Cloudflare's free tier — which is why we can afford to charge nothing until you make real calls.