Can you keep your existing phone number?

Short answer: yes, you keep it. Your number is on your signage, your cards, your Google listing and in your customers’ phones, and no sensible product asks you to change it.

The question worth asking instead is who owns the number and the account behind it — because that is what decides how hard it would be to leave.

Two ways vendors handle this

The vendor gives you a number. Simplest to start: they hand you one, calls work that day, one bill. The number lives in their account. If you leave, you generally leave it behind — which means everything printed with it stops working, and the switching cost was set on the day you signed.

The line is in your own account. You hold the telephony account; the assistant connects to it. Slightly more setup, one extra bill, and the number is unambiguously yours.

We do the second. Your calls run through an Exotel account in your own name, billed to you directly at cost — we do not resell you minutes and do not mark up carriage.

That makes our published price look higher next to a bundled quote, and it is worth understanding why: a bundled per-minute price includes carriage plus the vendor’s margin on carriage. Ours does not include carriage at all.

What actually happens to your number

Nothing changes for your callers. They ring the same number they always have. Behind it, the call is routed to the assistant instead of ringing a handset that nobody is free to pick up.

You can also keep some calls human — this is not all-or-nothing.

The questions to ask any vendor

1. Whose name is the telephony account in?
2. If I leave in six months, do I keep the number?
3. Is the per-minute price you quoted including carriage, or on top of it?
4. Can I see the carrier’s own bill, or only your summary of it?

That last one is a good tell. If you cannot see what carriage actually cost, you cannot know what margin sits on it.

⚠️ One real limit: Exotel is the only telephony provider wired today. The layer is built to take others and only Exotel is registered. If you are committed to a different carrier, that is a genuine reason we are not the fit right now, and we would rather say so than take the meeting.

On WhatsApp, the same principle

Your WhatsApp Business number stays yours, connected through Meta’s Cloud API, and if the number already has chat history from the WhatsApp app, that history is brought across so the assistant is not starting blind.

Meta’s own messaging fees stay in your account at cost, for the same reason the telephony does.