carrier price hikes for simple api calls are getting ridiculous

honestly just spent the last 4 hours staring at sip logs and I'm ready to throw our whole alerting system in the trash

Management wanted us to set up an automated voice fallback for our internal monitoring alerts because some of the junior devs keep sleeping through slack pings. seems simple enough right? but the second you try to build a basic script to just dial an on-call number, the big carriers want to charge you an arm and a leg for SIP trunking and hit you with all these arbitrary monthly minimums. We literally just need a machine to call our own staff at 3am if a critical server goes down. we aren't running some massive enterprise call center here

Was reading through the drop cowboy api setup this morning just trying to find a lightweight way to trigger outbound notifications without having to maintain an entire asterisk instance just for like, a dozen emergency calls a month..

it just blows my mind how complex and expensive it has become just to make a server dial a phone number nowadays. the whole voip ecosystem feels like it's actively hostile to small internal use cases. might honestly just buy everyone on the engineering team a physical 90s pager and call it a day tbh.