When you need a machine, and when you don't

Without a server

Pocket is built so that a phone is enough. Bots run in a short-lived sandbox Pocket provides; a team shares bots, the CRM, leads, call lists, dashboards and the playbook in the app, on Pocket's own infrastructure, with nothing to rent. Calls on a Pocket Link or a rooted phone with the free on-device voice run on the phone itself: it hears with Android's recogniser, asks the model through Pocket, speaks with Android's voice, and only the transcript goes up when the call ends. Calls with natural voices run on Pocket's shared engine, included in every plan. None of this needs a machine.

What a machine is for

• Something that stays. A dev server you keep open, a desktop, a database, a site, a long build, a bot with a memory of files: anything that must outlive one run.
• Many calls at once. The shared engine carries about four live calls at a time for everyone on it. A team whose reps call together, or runs several inbound lines, needs lines of its own: a machine's cores decide how many (below), and one switch moves the team's calls onto it. Calls on your machine.
• Your own hardware or region. Data that must stay on your server or in your cloud account: connect your own machine, or create one in your cloud; Pocket charges nothing for those.

How many calls a machine carries

About four live calls per vCPU before audio detection starts to lag; the Starter machine's cores are shared on Google's side, so count it at half. Starter (2 vCPU, ₹1,100 a month at Google's price plus 30%) carries about 4 calls at once; Standard (2 vCPU, ₹4,400) about 8; Pro (4 vCPU, ₹8,800) about 16; past that, the team splits lines across machines. Ask any bot: "we have ten reps calling together, what do we need?" and it answers from these numbers with the machine and the monthly cost, can create it, and can turn calls on for it.

What it costs and how it is charged

A Pocket-hosted machine is metered by the hour at Google's price plus 30% while it runs, and a fraction of that while it sleeps; the day's total shows under Account → Plan and comes off your wallet. It sleeps on its own after an idle period you choose and wakes when a bot or you need it. Model tokens on a machine still bill as credits (or on your key); speech and phone lines are on your own provider accounts. Your own server or cloud account: nothing from Pocket.