What It Costs and What I'd Tell You

Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:38:00 -0600

MY OWN TEXTING · MESSAGE 08 · THE RECEIPT

Google Voice was free. This costs a little. Here's exactly how little, and what it bought me.

The bill

I pulled these numbers straight from Telnyx’s usage records while writing this. This is the last 30 days for all my lines, not just my main number:

What Telnyx actually billed me, last 30 days (read Oct 2, 2026)

AI receptionist$10.55 about 155 calls the AI answered across all my lines

Texting$2.48 332 texts in and out, pictures included

Phone trunk$1.13 regular calls to and from my office phone system

Call recordings$0.62

Call control$0.54 my server deciding where each call goes

Usage total$15.32Not included: about $1 a month per phone number, the $10/month texting campaign fee, and roughly $10/month for the cloud server that runs my office phone system.

The texting itself, the thing this whole story is about, was $2.48 for 332 messages. Add the fixed costs from the note under the table and the whole setup, AI receptionist included, comes to about $45 a month. That’s less than most cell phone plans.

My AI teammates, using the front door

Here’s a part of the payoff I didn’t expect. On September 28 my AI assistants got their own way into my texts: a small command-line tool that talks to my server (plus a version they can plug into directly) that can list unread threads, read a conversation, check calls and voicemails, and draft a reply.

Drafting is as far as it goes. Nothing gets sent until I approve the exact words and the exact person.

It also took some retraining. Twice, an assistant went looking for a text in my old Google apps out of habit. I told it the same thing both times:

Sep 28

Me → LeoWe don’t use Google Messages. We use the [KCCS Text] app that we developed.

That’s now a standing rule for every assistant I run. My texts live on my server, and that’s the only place anyone, human or AI, goes to read them.

Still on the list

It’s ErrorZap, so here’s what’s still broken. While writing this, I tried searching my texts through the assistants’ tool, and every search came back empty, even for common words. The texts are all there. The search isn’t working, so that’s next on the fix list. I’ll bet it’s something small. It usually is.

If you want to do this

You don’t have to build an app to get most of the benefit. Here’s what I’d tell a friend:

Export first. Run Google Takeout on Google Voice before you touch anything. Ten years of texts are worth an hour of downloading.
Practice on a new number. Get a cheap number at a carrier like Telnyx and live on it for a while before porting the one that matters.
Do the 10DLC paperwork early, and use your real documents. Make sure your business name and tax ID match your IRS letter exactly. Put SMS terms and a privacy policy on your website before you apply.
Check your two-factor codes. Some services won’t text codes to VoIP numbers. Move important accounts to an authenticator app before port day.
Push, don’t poll. If you build anything, have the server tell the app about new messages. Polling caused my worst bug.
Test against a fake carrier. A staging copy that fakes the carrier’s API caught more bugs than anything else, and it never sent a single real text.
Watch the whole path, not just the server. My worst failure produced no errors at all. A monitor that tests the outcome (does a VIP call actually ring?) would have caught it in minutes instead of days.

Was it worth it?

My business number is mine now. It’s not a feature of somebody else’s free product. Every text I’ve sent or received since September 15 sits in a database I own. My phone makes a different sound for each person. My AI assistants can help with my texts without scraping anything. And when a stranger calls while I’m under a desk, a robot politely takes a message for about seven cents.

I’d do it again. I’d just put the monitor in on day one.

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