magic-amber•8mo ago
Couldn’t I build this myself and save money?
You could (and the person writing this right now did, from scratch) — but there are good reasons for not doing so.
Writing a great realtime voice AI application from scratch is a fairly challenging task (more on those challenges here). Most of these challenges are not apparent until you face them, then you realize you are 3 weeks into a rabbit hole that may take months to properly solve out of.
Think of Vapi as hiring a software engineering team for this hard problem, while you focus on what uniquely generates value for your voice AI application.
But to address cost, the vast majority of cost in running your application will come from provider cost (Speect-to-text, LLM, Text-to-speech) direct with vendors (Deepgram, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, etc) — where we add no fee (vendor cost passes-through). These would have to be incurred anyway.
Vapi only charges its small fee on top of these for the continuous maintenance & improvement of these hardest components of your system (which would have costed you time to write/maintain).
No matter what, some cost is inescapable (in money, time, etc) to solve this challenging technical problem.
Our focus is solely on foundational Voice AI orchestration, & it’s what we put our full time and resources into.
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