Well, I guess it comes down to personality and level of what you're willing to do yourself to save some money/save yourself some time.
In my case, some simple scripting provided all the functionality this app provides. It probably cost an extra ~20 minutes of my time over if I had gone with TellFi. I chose python, since I'm most comfortable it, but I could have done it with a variety of languages. Their support is so good, and the scripting is so simple, that it really only requires a minimal understanding to get it all working.
I obviously could have gone with Asterisk, and saved even more money. It would be "a few days" of work, however, not about an hour. I'm just saying that, to me, it's not worth that much work to save such a small amount of money/month to start that far back in the chain, whereas it is worth an hour of my time to save some money and potentially allow myself more control/functionality in the future.
I'm not saying that TellFi is useless—I'm just saying that to me, the value proposition over something like Tropo or Twilio is not clear.
Many companies that require simple yet flexible and powerful telephony may not have any coding skills. TellFi is offering an idiot-proof solution. Thats invaluable.
Even if you have amazing coding power on your team (or personally), it comes down to opportunity cost. As a coder, it might be pretty cool to feel that you hacked together your own phone system, but then if you want to change the routing system or welcome message or something, do you have to hack some more? And when does that end?
Maybe that time can be better spend elsewhere (i.e. improving on something that only you can do - maybe something that improves your product).
I personally think TellFi looks really cool, and the built in analytics is super cool too. If I lived in the states (they only provide US and Canadian numbers) I'd definitely give it a whirl.
In my case, some simple scripting provided all the functionality this app provides. It probably cost an extra ~20 minutes of my time over if I had gone with TellFi. I chose python, since I'm most comfortable it, but I could have done it with a variety of languages. Their support is so good, and the scripting is so simple, that it really only requires a minimal understanding to get it all working.
I obviously could have gone with Asterisk, and saved even more money. It would be "a few days" of work, however, not about an hour. I'm just saying that, to me, it's not worth that much work to save such a small amount of money/month to start that far back in the chain, whereas it is worth an hour of my time to save some money and potentially allow myself more control/functionality in the future.
I'm not saying that TellFi is useless—I'm just saying that to me, the value proposition over something like Tropo or Twilio is not clear.