Hey all.
I had just gotten off of a call with a client of mine that I will be losing shortly here. They signed up for a service that will provide them phones and all sorts of AI functionality. One of his key selling points was automatic call transcriptions. At first I was like “Ah ha! I can do that with FPBX!” then I looked into the costs of Scribe. My client does over 8000 minutes a month.
Am I reading it right that I’d need the 9 x of the $39 modules?
Looking into his call logs its literally thousands of 1 minutes calls. Removing them as we are still doing 5.6K minutes worth of calls.
With our basic service charges + the scrip subscriptions it is cheaper for him to get the other service.
I don’t know what to think about this other than be annoyed.
No, you are not. You pay $24.99/month and get 1000 minutes included. You need “Top-Up” packs at 1000 minutes a piece to cover anything beyond the 1000 minutes each month. So for 8000 minutes per month you would need an additional 7 “Top-Ups” per month.
As for your own pricing issues, no clue what you charge the customer now and how you charge for it. But if they were paying per user and they had 50 users it would be
$39.99 x 7 = $279.93 + $24.99 = $304.92 — Total Monthly
$304.92 / 50 = $6.10 per user (the more users, the lower this cost will be and vice versa)
Or you could be charging by usage with means $304.92 / 8000 minutes is roughly $0.038/minute.
If you’re charging a high rate and the margin isn’t enough that you could absorb some of the cost to keep the client then I’d say your pricing model needs to be looked at.
Hi @dcorwin822 a few other things to point out here.
1: It’s configurable per extension. You don’t have to run scribe on all exts, you can pick and choose who gets it. You can also drill past per user to say, that a user’s voicemails get scribed, recorded calls or both. So there are some catch controls if needed.
2: Our partner program offers reseller discounts here. Happy to discuss this further.
Just some info on the top up piece to help explain.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say a customer signs up for scribe at one token ($24.99) thinking that 1000 mins will cover the need. From here, they realize that they actually need around 1300 mins per month to cover their usage. In this case, instead of buying another token (they’re stackable at $24.99 - 1000min a pop) they could just add a top up. The top up mins don’t close out after 30 days, these 1000min last 3-months.
In this use case (Needs 1300min)
Customer buys
(1) Scribe token
(1) TUM
And they are good for 3 months – Add another tum month 4
Quick recap…
Scribe token pack - 1000min: FPBX-C01M-SCRIBE (Use in a month)
Scribe TUM -1000min: FPBX-C01M-SCRIBETUM (Use over 3 months)
Hope this helps - please let me know if you have any other questions.
MW
From a provider perspective, FreePBX is still the king of flexibility, but these specialized modules can definitely squeeze your margins if you aren’t on a high-tier partner plan. We see this often at Sip24.cc; usually, the move is to offload the heavy lifting (like transcription) to an external API via AGI scripts rather than using the native paid modules. It keeps your per-minute costs predictable so you don’t have to keep buying “Top-Ups” just to stay competitive.
If the client is doing 8k minutes, maybe try pitching the “bespoke” security and control of FreePBX over those black-box AI platforms. Good luck keeping them!
You can do this almost completely for free with for example:
I’ve been using this for years now and it’s using the google speech API and works great. I don’t think I’ve ever exceeded the free minutes from google but even if you exceed this it will cost only pennies. Rewriting the script to that it uses another API (I’ve always wanted to try the Mistral API since I hear they are the very best in terms of voice recognition) can probably easily be done with the help of any AI of your choice even if you are not a bash coding expert.