Home / Docs / Getting Started / How TelBuddy Works
TelBuddy is not a phone carrier, and it never carries a single call or text itself. It's a dashboard that sits on top of a business phone account you already own — a Twilio account, a Telnyx account, or both at the same time — and turns that raw carrier infrastructure into something a non-technical team can actually run day to day.
Twilio and Telnyx are built for developers. Their consoles are API dashboards, not front-desk tools — there's no shared inbox for a team, no phone-menu builder you can point and click through, no notes log for a customer, no AI receptionist. TelBuddy is the layer in between: the same carrier account, with an interface built for the people actually answering the phone and replying to texts every day.
Nothing about your account changes hands. Your phone numbers stay registered to your own Twilio or Telnyx account. Your API credentials are stored so TelBuddy can talk to that account on your behalf, but the account itself — and everything in it — remains yours. If you ever stop using TelBuddy, your numbers, your message history with the carrier, and your billing relationship with them are completely unaffected.
Provider is a setting on each phone number, not on your account. This is easy to miss and it matters: a single TelBuddy login, with one shared inbox and one team, can run some numbers through Twilio and others through Telnyx at the same time. There's no "pick a carrier" step for your whole account. This is useful if you're migrating from one carrier to the other gradually, want a second carrier as a backup, or already had numbers split across both before finding TelBuddy.
How billing actually splits. TelBuddy charges one flat membership price per month (or a discounted annual rate) for the software itself — the inbox, the AI, the IVR builder, the dialer, contacts, all of it. That price doesn't move based on how many texts you send or minutes you talk. Separately, your carrier usage — the literal cost of sending a message or connecting a call — is billed directly to you by Twilio or Telnyx, at their own published rates. TelBuddy never sees that invoice, never marks it up, and never takes a cut of it.