★★★★★5.0·31 reviews on Clutch
Vapi and Retell AI alternatives

Leave Vapi or Retell without rebuilding your agent

A working agent on your own stack in 2-3 weeks, from $6,400. Any call volume.

If Vapi or Retell AI is costing more than it saves, the fix isn't another platform. It's owning the three pieces you currently rent: the media path, the transcripts, and the model calls. We rebuild your agent on LiveKit and SIP, keep the prompts and the call flows you already tuned, and hand you the repo.

Media pathLiveKit or SIP, yours
TranscriptsYour database
Model callsStraight to the provider
Built for

Three reasons teams call us about this

› 1

Your per-minute bill passed your own infra cost

The platform charges per minute for work your servers could do. At a few thousand calls a month the gap is small. Past that it's the line item your CFO circles.

› 2

Compliance asked where the recordings live

The answer was "in their logs," and that ended the conversation. Transcripts are your data, and in a regulated product they can't sit in a vendor's account.

› 3

You need to swap a provider without a rewrite

A price change at your STT vendor, or accuracy that falls apart on noisy telephony audio, shouldn't turn into a three-month project.

Compare

Stay, switch platforms, or own it

What decides it
Option AStay on Vapi or Retell
Option BMove to another platform
Option CYour own stack
Who carries the audio
Their infrastructure
Their infrastructure
Yours: LiveKit or SIP
Where transcripts land
Their logs
Their logs
Your database
Per-minute floor
Model and carrier cost only
Swapping STT or TTS
What they support
What they support
A config change
Latency tuning
Their knobs
Their knobs
Turn detection, endpointing, barge-in on your audio
What you own at the end
Prompts and flows
Prompts and flows
The repo, the data, the numbers
Worth it below ~3,000 calls a month
Yes
Maybe
No, and we'll say so

We can help with both. Move to another platform and optimize your voice stack, or build your own solution with full control over the infrastructure, data, and code.

How the move works

Six steps, and what breaks at each one

A migration off a managed platform is mostly calendar time and one round of re-tuning. Here is where each of the six goes wrong.

1Export prompts and flows
What breaksThey come out as text, not as behaviour. Expect to re-tune turn handling once.
2Take over the carrier and the SIP trunk
What breaksNumber porting is the slow part, and it's calendar time, not engineering time.
3Put STT and TTS behind an interface
What breaksOne day of work that saves the next migration.
4Run the agent loop on your infrastructure
What breaksThis is where latency is won or lost.
5Run both in parallel on a slice of traffic
What breaksSame calls, two stacks, real comparison.
6Cut over
What breaksThe old account stays open for a month. Nobody cuts over on faith.
Cost of staying

The bill you're comparing against

A managed platform charges per minute for the media path, the model call, and the orchestration as one bundled rate. On your own stack you pay the carrier and the model separately, and the orchestration is code you already own. That's the whole arithmetic. The break point isn't a secret, it's a number you can compute from last month's invoice.

Vapi, BYOK~$0.108per minute · from our comparison
Retell AI~$0.101per minute · from our comparison
Your stack~$0.058carrier plus model per minute
What teams build

What runs on it after the move

Inbound supportFirst-line answers from your own knowledge base, handoff to a human with the transcript attached.
Appointment bookingReads and writes your calendar directly; no middle system to sync.
Outbound qualificationDials the list, asks the three questions, writes the answers to your CRM.
After-hours overflowTakes the calls nobody is there for and leaves a structured note, not a voicemail.
Call deflectionResolves the status and password calls before they reach the queue.
Voice conciergeOne number for a hotel, clinic or building that knows the schedule and the rules.
Build vs buy

When owning it is the wrong call

Managed platformVapi, Retell AI, or the next one
Your own stackLiveKit or SIP, your cloud, your repo
Control
You tune the knobs they expose: a voice, a model, a few timing settings. When a call misbehaves you file a ticket.
Turn detection, endpointing, barge-in and provider choice are yours to change, on your audio, the same day.
Ownership
Prompts and flows are yours as text. The media path, the transcripts and the phone numbers sit in their account.
The repo, the recordings, the transcripts and the numbers are yours from day one. Leaving us costs nothing.
Fit
Right when the agent is a feature, volume is modest and nobody wants to run infrastructure. Most teams start here, and should.
Right when the agent is the product, when compliance asks where the data lives, or when the per-minute bill has passed your own infra cost.

There’s no one-size-fits-all stack. We can optimize a managed platform, help you move to another provider, or build your own infrastructure. We’ll help you choose the approach that fits your product, volume, and requirements.

Four ways in

Four ways to bring us in

Pick the one that matches where the build is now. The engagement model is underneath the pricing.

Pricing

What it costs

Three scopes. The middle one is what most teams leaving a platform actually need.

› 1

Pilot move

from $6,4002-3 weeks
One flow off the platform
Your carrier
Your database
Parallel run on a slice of traffic
Scope this with us
› 2

Full agent on your stack

from $12,8004-6 weeks
Every flow
Provider interfaces for STT and TTS
Latency tuning on your audio
Cutover plan
Scope this with us
› 3

Platform-grade build

from $25,000from 2 months
Multi-tenant
On-prem or your cloud
Compliance review
Observability
Handover with the repo
Scope this with us
Time & Materials

How most of our clients work

  • You pay for hours worked, billed weekly
  • A detailed timesheet shows where every hour went
  • Change direction any week, no renegotiation
  • Any change to the estimate is approved by you before the hours are spent
Get a free estimate
Fixed price

When you need one number signed off

  • Available after discovery, on a scope we document together
  • One price and one timeline, agreed before development starts
  • Changes to that scope are quoted separately
  • Best when the scope is settled and unlikely to move
Ask about a fixed scope
Why us

Why teams hand us the phone

Four claims, each with a named system behind it.

600M+ call minutes a month

We built Nucleus, an on-premise communication platform whose AI phone agents run at that volume for 5,000+ businesses, under SOC II, GDPR and HIPAA.

Real-time voice at national scale

TransLinguist runs on the NHS UK national framework with 75+ languages and 30,000+ interpreters.

250+ projects since 2005

Video, real-time and AI, with 50 in-house engineers.

You own it

The repo, the data and the phone numbers are yours on day one, not at the end.

FAQ

Leaving a voice platform — common questions.

What moves, what breaks, what it costs, who owns it.

Ask an engineer
Is there a real Vapi alternative if I don't want another platform?
What actually moves when you migrate off Retell AI?
Will latency get worse on our own stack?
What does it cost to leave?
When should we stay on Vapi or Retell?
Can we keep our phone numbers?
Do we have to run it on-premise?
Who owns the code?
Can you run both stacks in parallel first?
How do you price a build with an unclear scope?
Go deeper

Explore our services

Build beyond the limits of off-the-shelf voice platforms — with AI agents, custom integrations, and production-ready voice infrastructure.

See it built

Real products

See how we turn real-time communication and AI into production software for real businesses.

Read next

From the blog

Practical guides to voice AI platforms, custom development, costs, and the decisions behind the stack.

Free · reply the same business day

Send us last month's invoice and one call flow

You get back the per-minute arithmetic on your own numbers, a migration order for your flows, and a straight answer on whether to stay. Yours to keep either way.