Background
Charleston Telecom Solutions is a hosted VoIP provider based in Summerville, South Carolina, serving small and mid-size businesses since 2011. It’s also a longtime SkySwitch reseller and a Datagate customer since 2021, when it first used Datagate to automate its telecom billing and payments. In 2025, that partnership expanded to include Alternative Payments, cutting billing and reconciliation time by roughly five hours a week.
In March 2026, Charleston Telecom launched Allsio, an in-house AI voice and business SMS platform built to handle calls and texts for its own customers, model-agnostic, built on OpenAI and Deepgram, and designed to be configured in plain language rather than code. The first use case was after-hours call triage: instead of paying a live answering service to pick up the phone overnight, customers could hand that off to an AI agent that listens to the caller, figures out what they need, and either routes the call to the right on-call person or holds it for the next business day.
The technology worked. The harder problem was figuring out how to charge for it.
The challenge: pricing something that costs a different amount every time
“That was something we spent a lot of time on initially, trying to figure out just how to charge for it,” says John Bascom. “It can be very cost-flexible as to how much it actually costs us per phone call.”
Unlike a flat-rate phone line, every AI-handled call carries a different cost depending on how long it runs and how much processing it needs. Charleston Telecom needed a pricing model precise enough to reflect that variability, simple enough for customers to understand, and easy enough for Charleston Telecom itself to bill without adding new manual work to its own operations.
“Getting the working product was only 10% of the battle,” Bascom says. “Getting everything going, getting our first bills out, making sure your billing was correct, that was the hardest part.”
The solution: per-second billing, run through the same system as everything else
Charleston Telecom settled on a per-minute billing model with granularity down to the second. If a call runs 30 seconds, the customer is billed for 30 seconds, not rounded up to a full minute.
“If somebody’s on the phone for 30 seconds, we’re not billing them a whole minute, it’s 30 seconds of time,” Bascom explains. “Our actual time and their actual time is the same.”
Usage is sold in tiered bundles, Starter, Pro, and Enterprise, each with its own included minutes and per-minute rate, plus a modest overage charge if a customer goes over. Pricing runs in reverse of what you might expect: the Starter bundle has the highest per-minute cost, and Enterprise the lowest. “It’s a bit like selling a phone system,” Bascom says.
To bill it, Charleston Telecom didn’t build a new system, it extended the one it already had. AI usage is sent to Datagate through a CDR-based feed, the same mechanism Charleston Telecom already uses to bill its phone service. “We’re sending our CDR records through that feed into Datagate, and it bills out the exact usage that’s being used,” Bascom says.
As Allsio has grown beyond the original phone agent, so has the billing behind it. Charleston Telecom now also uses AI for SMS texting agents and voice campaigns, calls that use text-to-speech to reach customers, with a DTMF option connecting them straight to a live AI agent, plus geocoding for contact data. All of that usage, tokens, SMS message counts, and more, is billed as bespoke custom products created directly through the Datagate API rather than the CDR feed, updated throughout the billing period and regenerated automatically each month.
Results
No new invoice, just new line items. AI usage bills on the exact same invoice as the rest of a customer’s Charleston Telecom services. “It’s just the same bill they were always getting, just some additional line items on it,” Bascom says.
A fraction of the old cost. Before Allsio, one customer was paying thousands of dollars a month for a live answering service just to pick up after-hours calls and pass along notes. “Ours is a fraction of that right now,” Bascom says.
No pushback on usage-based pricing. Customers can see their AI usage down to the second, both on their monthly bill and in a live portal. If a customer is approaching their plan limit, Charleston Telecom proactively offers an upgrade before it costs them anything extra. “They haven’t really mentioned any negative aspect about the price,” Bascom says.
A platform that grew past its original use case. What started as an after-hours phone agent has expanded into SMS agents, voice campaigns, and geocoding, all billed through Datagate, without Charleston Telecom having to stand up a separate billing process for each new service.
Advice for other MSPs considering AI resale
Bascom’s advice to other MSPs looking at reselling AI services centers on getting the billing right before scaling: “Getting the billing right is extremely important.” He also cautions against reaching for the cheapest AI model to save money upfront: “Don’t start with a cheap model and try to make it work. You’re going to waste a lot of time doing that. Start with something that’s capable, and work your way back.”
