Should you build your own transcription pipeline on an OpenAI-style speech API, or
use a managed service? We run the managed service, so you'd expect us to say managed.
Instead, here's the whole comparison — including the cases where DIY genuinely
makes sense.
// What "DIY" actually involves
Signing up for a speech-to-text API is the easy part. The project is everything
around it:
Get the recordings out of 3CX — pull call recordings from the PBX automatically, handle its formats and retention settings.
Build the pipeline — submit audio to the API, chunk long calls to fit its limits, handle rate limits, retries and failures, store the results somewhere searchable.
Build a way to read them — the API gives you raw text in a JSON blob. A dashboard, search and history are all on you. So is sentiment, if you want it.
Maintain it forever — APIs get deprecated, models change, pricing changes. Every change is your weekend.
Most businesses that start this project underestimate steps 3 and 4. The transcript
text was never the hard part — the product around it was.
// The costs, honestly
DIY API minutes run around £0.005/min — about £25/month at our Starter bundle's volume. Cheaper minutes, genuinely.
Your engineering time is the real cost: days to build the first working version, then permanent maintenance. Even at modest contractor rates, the build dwarfs a year of managed pricing.
With Pipertech — from £39/month, nothing to build, nothing to maintain, and the price on the page is the price.
If your time is free and you'd enjoy the project, the DIY maths can win on paper.
That's not a slight — it's why we say on our own site that other AI services
will probably be cheaper than us.
// Where your call audio actually goes
With the big AI APIs, your customers' call audio leaves the country for processing
— and for most of those providers, it leaves the EU entirely. That means
international transfer assessments, consent questions, and explanations you'd rather
not give a customer who asks where their conversation went.
Pipertech is UK only. Transcription runs on our own Apple Silicon
servers in a UK datacentre, under UK jurisdiction. No transfers, no homework —
and you can tell your own customers exactly that.
// What you get with Pipertech that DIY doesn't include
Transcripts in your 3CX GUI — the native 3CX AI Server integration, not text in a database somewhere.
Sentiment scoring on every call, out of the box.
A live usage portal — minutes remaining, daily charts, renewal projections.
Fair, automatic limits — pause at the limit, resume on renewal. No surprise invoices.
Someone to phone — monitoring, updates and capacity planning are our job, not a backlog ticket.
// When DIY genuinely makes sense
You're a development shop and the pipeline is a fun Friday, not a project.
UK data residency genuinely isn't a requirement for your calls.
You want raw API-level control over models and fine-tuning that a managed service won't give you.
We'll tell you if you're one of those businesses — a managed bundle would be
the wrong sale, and we'd rather not make it.
// The one-line verdict
DIY buys you cheaper minutes. Pipertech buys you a working system
— transcribing in your 3CX GUI this week, running in the UK, with the ops handled
forever. If that sounds like the trade you want:
see the service or
talk to us.