Earlier I was using other platforms for production voice agents. One thing that became obvious was the cost: 60–70% of our total spend was the Vapi platform fee, and only 30-40% was actual LLM/STT/TTS usage. Platform cost dominated everything. That alone pushed us toward something self-hosted.

But when we switched to OSS stacks (Pipecat, LiveKit), we realise that even with great OSS, the plumbing was still painful and necessary- no standard way to extract variables from conversations (name/date/order ID), no straightforward tracing of LLM calls, no way to run AI-to-AI test loops, and no fast workflow iteration - and every change meant another redeploy.

The infrastructure glue kept ballooning, and each time it felt like rebuilding the same system from scratch.

Dograh came out of that combination of cost pain and integration pain. Happy to dig deeper into anything.