An Indian Number for Your Voice Agent: Rent One From Us, or Bring the One You Have

Two ways to get a number, and the honest cost of each

A voice agent with no number can talk to you in a browser and nobody else. Getting it a real Indian number is the last step before it does actual work, and there are exactly two routes.

• Rent one from us — ₹349 a month. One line item on one invoice, in rupees, alongside your call minutes. Nothing to negotiate and no separate carrier account.
• Bring your own number from Plivo, Vobiz, Twilio or Telnyx — ₹0 from us. If you already hold numbers with Plivo, Vobiz, Twilio or Telnyx, point one at your agent and we charge you nothing for the number itself. You keep the carrier relationship and you keep paying that carrier directly. Nobody is putting a margin on a number you already own.

Either way, the calls themselves are billed the same: from ₹2 a minute, all-inclusive, in 30-second pulses. More on that below.

What importing does not cover

Bring-your-own-number means Plivo, Vobiz, Twilio or Telnyx. That is the list.

Plivo and Twilio numbers need that account's credentials saved before they answer calls, because those carriers sign every call with your token. A Vobiz number answers with just the address; Vobiz credentials are only needed for outgoing calls. For Twilio, you connect your Twilio account — Account SID and Auth Token — in the Import panel, and we set the number up in Twilio for you, pointing its Voice URL at us. There is nothing to paste.

An imported Twilio or Vobiz number does less. Voicemail detection and transferring a call to a person are not available on it; they work on numbers you rent from us and on Plivo and Telnyx numbers you import. Recording works on every number. For Telnyx, you paste one API key and we create an application on your Telnyx account that answers the number — nothing to paste into Telnyx either.

One agent can call out from numbers on several providers — a number rented from us and an imported Twilio number, say. You choose which number a call goes from, in the Playground or with the from field on the calls API, and a campaign can spread across them. Each call goes through its own number's provider.

You cannot import an Exotel number, and the same goes for Ozonetel and Knowlarity. We would like to say otherwise and we are not going to. If your existing numbers are with one of those, the route is renting from us, or porting to Plivo yourself first and then importing.

This is the sort of thing a platform normally leaves you to discover during setup. Stating it on a marketing page costs us some signups and saves you an afternoon.

DLT registration is yours, and we are not going to blur that

Commercial calling in India runs under TRAI's TCCCPR framework, which requires the business behind the calls to be registered — as a principal entity, on a DLT platform, through an access provider. That registration belongs to you. It carries your identity, your consent records and your liability, and it is not a thing a software vendor can hold on your behalf.

What the platform does is make it possible to operate inside those rules once you are registered:

• Calling hours time-boxed to 9am–9pm IST, on top of your own per-campaign windows.
• 140-series support. TRAI designates the 140 prefix for commercial calls, and a recipient's phone can tell them what kind of call this is before they answer. Some businesses hate that. It is the rule.
• A do-not-contact list that outlives any single campaign and is separate from per-contact consent, plus a full call log with transcripts and recordings for when somebody asks what was actually said.

Compliance tooling and being compliant are different things. We ship the first.

One number is a liability at volume

The failure mode of outbound calling in India is not a bad script. It is a number that gets flagged as a spam dialler in week two, after which your answer rate collapses and no amount of prompt editing brings it back.

• Number pooling. Dial from a set of numbers rather than one, so no single number carries the whole campaign's reputation.
• The same customer keeps the same number. A person who was called from one number and calls back to a different one has been given a reason to distrust you. Sticky assignment is not a nicety.
• 200 calls per number per day, as a cap rather than a suggestion.
• Pacing caps calls per rolling hour, restricts weekdays in the customer's timezone, and skips holidays in the business's timezone. Those are two different clocks.
• Retries that respect an answer. Busy retries in minutes, no answer in an hour or more. Somebody who actively declined is never rung again, and neither is a dead number.
• Voicemail detection leaves a campaign-specific message instead of reading your pitch to a machine. Available on ThinnestAI, Plivo and Telnyx numbers.

What the number is actually for

• Inbound. Point the number at an agent and it answers, in any of 37 reply languages including all 22 scheduled Indian languages, from the same knowledge base your website widget uses.
• Outbound campaigns. Upload a list, set the hours, and read connect rate, average talk time and the disposition breakdown afterwards rather than "calls placed".
• Callbacks. "Call me back after five" resolves against your workspace clock, respects calling hours, and can be cancelled from the console.
• The caller arrives already known. Someone who messaged you on WhatsApp last week is matched to that history by their phone number, and the agent opens the call knowing you have spoken. Because caller ID is spoofable, the default disclosure tier lets it say you have spoken before without repeating what was said until the person verifies.

What it costs to use

• From ₹2 a minute — ₹2 for standard voices, ₹2.5 for premium ones.
• All-inclusive. Telephony, speech recognition, the language model and speech synthesis are inside that rate. No per-language surcharge, no provider passthrough.
• 30-second pulses, not rounded up to the whole minute.
• The number: ₹349 a month from us (₹249/mo on Scale), or ₹0 for an imported Plivo, Vobiz, Twilio or Telnyx number you keep paying that carrier for.
• Prices are pre-GST, in rupees, through Razorpay and UPI.
• Recordings are deleted after 30 days on Pay As You Go, 49 on Pro and 75 on Scale.

What we are not going to claim

• No answer-rate multiplier. You will see "local numbers get answered 3–4× more often" on pages like this one. We have not measured that on our own traffic, so we are not going to print it.
• No latency or call-quality figure. Carrier-call performance is not something we have measured to a standard we would defend.
• No guarantee against spam flagging. Pooling, pacing and retry discipline reduce the risk. Nobody can remove it, and a vendor who says they can is selling you something.

Get started

Build the agent first and have a browser call with it — that costs nothing and tells you whether it is ready for a number. Then rent one at ₹349, or import the Plivo, Vobiz, Twilio or Telnyx number you already have, and run a few hundred calls before you run a few thousand.

Get an Indian number for your agent →

No credit card required to start • Trial includes 25 voice minutes and 200 chat replies