Bring Your Own Twilio (BYOT)

Most subscribers let Allison Voice purchase a new phone number on their behalf — fastest path, nothing to configure on a third-party account. But if you already own phone numbers on your own Twilio account, you can route them through Allison instead. We call this BYOT — Bring Your Own Twilio.

This is the right path when:

• You already have an established phone number on Twilio with reputation, history, or A2P 10DLC registration you don't want to start over
• Your business has compliance requirements that mandate keeping the Twilio account in your name
• You want consolidated billing on your own Twilio account instead of paying through us
• You're migrating from another voice platform that ran on Twilio and want to keep the same numbers

If none of those apply, the simpler path is to let us purchase a new number for you. You can always switch later.

How phone-number setup works at signup

During onboarding, you'll see three options under "Phone setup":

• Forward — keep your existing business number on whatever provider you have today; set call forwarding to ring an Allison-purchased number. Fastest path; no provider migration. The forwarding step is on your existing provider's dashboard.
• New — let Allison purchase a brand-new phone number for you (in the area code of your choice). The number is purchased in our managed Twilio infrastructure; you don't deal with Twilio at all.
• BYOT — bring an existing Twilio number. You enter your Twilio Account SID and Auth Token; we route inbound calls on your number through Allison's voice agent.

You can change your mind later (e.g., start with Forward, switch to BYOT once you're comfortable). What you can't do today is mix multiple paths within one organization — see "What's not yet supported" below.

What you provide for BYOT

Two pieces of information from your Twilio Console:

• Account SID — the unique identifier for your Twilio account, visible at the top of the Twilio Console dashboard
• Auth Token — the secret token used to sign API requests. Found in Account → API Keys & Tokens in your Twilio Console

Plus the phone number itself (E.164 format, e.g., +15551234567) that you want to use.

We store the Auth Token encrypted (AES-256-GCM) on the phone-number record. It's never exposed in logs, transcripts, the dashboard UI, or webhook payloads. The decrypted form is held only in memory at the moment of a Twilio API call.

What we do with your Twilio credentials

The credentials are used for exactly three things:

1. Inbound call routing. When someone calls your number, Twilio sends a webhook to our voice service. We use your Auth Token to validate the webhook signature and accept the call.
2. Outbound API calls on your behalf. When the voice agent does something that affects the call (start recording, transfer to a team member, terminate), we call Twilio's API using your credentials. The action runs against your account.
3. Number verification at setup. We make a one-time call to Twilio to confirm the number exists in your account and your credentials work.

That's it. We don't enumerate other numbers in your Twilio account, don't read your call logs, don't make outbound calls or send messages on your account, don't change settings, and don't grant ourselves persistent OAuth-style access. Every Twilio API call we make is event-driven and logged in your Twilio Console.

If you ever revoke or rotate your Auth Token in the Twilio Console, the BYOT integration breaks until you update the new token in Allison Voice. Plan rotations together.

Costs

With BYOT, you pay Twilio directly for:

• The phone number (monthly fee — typically $1-2 per number)
• Per-minute call costs on your Twilio account
• A2P 10DLC registration if you're sending SMS (separate pricing)

You pay Allison Voice for:

• The platform subscription (Starter / Professional / Business per the Plans article)
• AI minutes per the plan you're on

The Allison subscription doesn't change based on BYOT vs new-number — it's the same plan rates. BYOT is about who provides the underlying phone-number infrastructure, not about discounted Allison pricing.

Switching between paths

Switching from Forward to BYOT, or from New to BYOT (or vice versa), is a manual transition managed by the team today. Reach out via the dashboard chat and we'll coordinate the swap so callers don't experience downtime.

The general flow:

1. Configure the new path on your end (e.g., set up your Twilio account if you haven't)
2. Tell us when you're ready
3. We update the routing on our side at the agreed-upon time
4. You verify by placing a test call

Number portability between Twilio accounts (e.g., porting an existing carrier number to your Twilio for BYOT) is a separate Twilio process that takes 5-15 business days. If you need that, plan ahead.

Limitations of the BYOT boundary

Some platform features only work with Allison-managed numbers because they need infrastructure-level control we don't have on your account:

• Per-org Twilio subaccount benefits — Allison-managed numbers each live in a per-customer Twilio subaccount we provision. That gives us per-customer cost attribution, reputation isolation, A2P 10DLC siloing, and clean offboarding. With BYOT, all of those are managed in your own Twilio account directly.
• Bulk operations from our admin tooling — number release, friendly-name updates, fleet-wide changes are managed by us for Allison-purchased numbers. For BYOT numbers, you do those in your Twilio Console.
• Per-call detail records billable to your account — every call still appears in the Twilio Console of whoever owns the account (you, for BYOT). For Allison-managed numbers, those CDRs are in our subaccount and surface only via the admin tooling.

Functionally, the calling experience is identical. Allison answers, the voice agent runs, knowledge base + tools work, transfers happen, the call ends, post-call processing fires, etc. The differences are operational, not user-facing.

What's not yet supported

A few capabilities are deliberately deferred:

• Self-service add-a-number after signup. The dashboard lets you manage one number per organization today (the one set during onboarding). Adding a second number — whether BYOT or new-purchase — is a v2-post-launch capability and currently coordinated by the team. Reach out via dashboard chat if you need a second number sooner.
• Mixing paths within one org. You can't have one number on BYOT and another on Allison-purchased simultaneously today (since multi-number itself is v2). When multi-number ships, mixed paths will be supported.
• Automated number portability. Porting numbers between carriers / accounts is a Twilio-side process; we don't automate it. You handle the port in Twilio's portal, then update us on the new credentials.
• Bring Your Own [other provider] — only Twilio is supported. Vonage, Telnyx, Bandwidth, etc. are not currently supported. Twilio is the only voice provider Allison's voice infrastructure connects to.
• Twilio API Key auth instead of Auth Token. We use Auth Token for BYOT. API Key auth has subtle compatibility issues with the Voice Agent API that prevent us from supporting it today.

If any of these are blockers for your setup, ask Allison to file a support ticket so the team can prioritize.