Billing & philosophy
A bit about how, what, and why we bill.
Philosophy
Cloudvox is designed for quality, control/flexibility, and reliability, and we'll prioritize those principles when making decisions and delivering the service.
Quality
Voice quality must be as close to perfect as possible. As everyone who has used a telephone knows, the existing public switched telephone network (PSTN) uses fairly low-quality audio (8 kHz mono), so there are practical limits.
However, calls to and from Cloudvox apps must be indistinguishable from a "traditional" phone or PBX. It's never acceptable to say "Oh, that was VoIP"; if you can tell, something went wrong.
And quality extends to aspects like customer service, where quality means thoughtful answers to questions at any technical depth, and to the self-service Web site, where quality means a very usable, feature-packed Web service and provisioning API.
Control/Flexibility
The foundation of API-driven phone calls is that anyone can build exactly what they need, with as few limitations as possible. It's the "long tail": make the phone network work however you want.
When given a choice, we will expose more control, not less, and try to make it as simple and well-documented as possible. Most of our resources will be spent making the phone network more customizable.
Reliability
Cloudvox needs to just work. Monitoring, scaling, load balancing, sharding, jitter benchmarks, distributed computing -- they're all required for phone services, but they aren't things that our customers should need to think about, at least in a phone context.
The point is being able to add phone calls to anything, even when phones are only 1% of the final service. Cloudvox customers should not need to devote much effort to operations (if any). We encourage customers to transfer that burden to Cloudvox, and we will continue reducing and centralizing the effort required to operate phone services.
Pricing & Payment
Pay As You Go
Cloudvox is priced and delivered as a "pay-as-you-go" service, where everyone buys only the capacity and sophistication they need. In the name of simplicity, Cloudvox has evolved into a flat price regardless of volume.
Cost per minute matters much less at small quantities. The difference between 3 cents per minute and 5 cents per minute is very small for a service with 100 minutes a month, yet there's a massive difference between being able to create exactly what you want and not being able to. Flexibility is what matters. As it happens, Cloudvox is 3 cents regardless of volume.
At higher volumes, cost becomes a bigger consideration -- specifically, depth of features, paying for only what you use, and tailoring the aspects which must scale for your specific service. The telecom industry has unique regulatory concerns and 80 years of legacy systems, so the hybrid monthly fee plus usage fee pricing lets Cloudvox expose these tradeoffs.
Concurrent Calls
Imagine building an 8-lane highway to handle 20 cars per day. 7 or 8 lanes are sitting idle all the time, and no amount of aggregate usage makes up for that. That's the case with phone applications: very few applications need more than 5 concurrent calls, and almost none use more than 50 concurrent calls.
As part of our commitment to helping customers keep costs low, we try to be transparent about Cloudvox's cost structure, and yet to "abstract away" as much of elastic scaling as we can.
A concurrent call only counts as long as it is actually live ("off hook"), rather than a 5 minute or 1 hour total. For example, imagine an app places 400 calls during a 1-hour period. If each call lasts 2 minutes, the app would have only needed 14 concurrent calls, not 400. When an app places two calls and is the midpoint between them, it is placing two separate calls (and counts as such).
Payment & Terms
Each customer also maintains a balance of prepaid funds to use for usage-based services (minutes) and phone numbers. Cloudvox debits usage fees from the funds that you deposit in your account.
This works like a gas tank. For example, imagine that you pay Cloudvox $20 for minutes, and that usage is 3 cents per minute. Your gas tank is now at 500 minutes.
As the month progresses, Cloudvox tracks the total cost of your calls, and your "tank" needs to contain enough money to pay for that usage. Simply add more funds to the account before your available minutes reach zero. Your balance is shown on every page of the Cloudvox Switchboard.
Features
Custom Caller ID
There is no per-number fee specific to Caller ID. You must own or have permission from the owner of each number that an app uses as its Caller ID, but it does not need to be a Cloudvox-provisioned number.
In some cases, Cloudvox may require a one-time outbound phone call to verify that the owner authorizes an app to Caller ID as this number. However, no across-the-board verification process is currently required.
Phone Numbers & Geography
Toll-Free
Cloudvox provides phone numbers ("Direct Inward Dialing" or "DIDs") in the United States and many countries in Western Europe and Asia, custom (vanity) and randomly-chosen (non-vanity) toll-free numbers in the US and Canada, and outbound calls to most of the world. We can often arrange a custom solution, or add support for, calling to and from other locations.
US Phone Numbers
US phone numbers are available in dozens of area codes and can be activated immediately (via Web site or API). Each number costs $3/month, and usage is billed separately.
Worldwide Phone Numbers
Numbers are available in many countries around the world, but provisioning and activation is currently a manual process (we're working on that). Please ask us.
Here's countries and rates where Cloudvox has numbers available.