I sold a voice AI agent for 20K to my FIRST BIG CLIENT

​ I’m a developer at a super small company in my town plus I do some freelance voice AI work on the side and had built small bots and agents before but nothing at this scale. A friend who knows what I do referred me to an ecom company whose support line was getting messed up coz customers call in hindi, tamil and english and their current IVR just routes everything to humans who are overloaded and many many calls drop before anyone picks up and they were getting like 4 to 5k calls a month. They did tell me two agencies had quoted them $40k to $60k and 3 4 months so when I quoted $20k and 8 weeks they were skeptical but my friend vouched and I did a live demo on a test number which got them convinced. I built their setup on Gnani’s websocket streaming API for STT, it handles all 3 languages plus code switching on one stream so no separate models per language. TTS is also gnani, sounds natural enough on 8kHz that I didn’t need anything on top. Telephony runs through a sip provider, calls hit my server, audio streams to gnani STT in 100ms chunks, bot processes intent and pulls order status and shipping info from their CRM API in real time and IF intent confidence is below my threshold or the query is outside defined flows it does a warm transfer to a human with the full transcript attached. their CRM had a decent REST API so integration wasn’t that hard but I spent 3 days just mapping their order status codes to natural language responses coz they had like 14 different statuses and many of them were the same thing. The actual Gnani integration took a day tho, most of the time was on the business logic around their specific workflows. and on top of the initial $20k they pay $3k/month retainer and I priced it as such coz I figured 10 15 hours a month for maintenance and prompt updates and it’s not 3 4 hours of easy work like I expected coz new edge cases keep coming up that didn’t exist in testing like a customer asked about a return in tamil then gave some order details in English and the bot matched the wrong order coz my entity extraction was splitting on the language switch, took me a full weekend to fix that. Their call drop rate went from 40% to under 10% and based on my logs about 65% of calls resolve without transferring to a human, they were going to hire 4 more support agents so from their side the investment made sense on day one and they didn't even negotiate. I’m still at my job but thinking about whether to find more clients and turn this into a proper agency or keep it as one client and collect the retainer also not sure if I can manage more while working full time but the margins are really really good.