Sales engagement pricing is a joke so now I'm fighting flow bulkification limits

honestly just tired of the constant workarounds. our owner wants to automate outreach for expired accounts, so obviously I looked at the native Sales Engagement add-on. quoted him the per-user licensing for the dialer features and he practically laughed me out of the office

so.. now i'm stuck building it on a budget. the concept was easy enough - a scheduled flow runs at 10am, grabs yesterday's expired contacts, and uses an HTTP Callout to ping a ringless voicemail API to drop a prerecorded message. saves our reps from dialing 200 dead numbers manually

It works perfectly in debug for one record. but when the scheduled flow runs the actual batch, it immediately fails with "Uncommitted Work Pending" errors. I know you aren't supposed to do callouts after DML, but I’m literally just getting records and making the callout, the record update happens after

tried tossing it into an asynchronous path but salesforce is still batching them up and hitting the concurrent callout limit. is there any way to cleanly bulkify external callouts in a scheduled flow without just surrendering and writing apex? Trying to keep this org declarative but man these governor limits are killing me today.