Why we retired the self-serve tier.

For most of the last year, MetisPro had a self-serve tier. Pick a plan, connect a phone number, upload a knowledge base, launch an agent. Standard SaaS playbook.

We retired it. On purpose — and we're not bringing it back.

Voice AI is not a subscription.

It's a deployment. Every business we serve has phones that work a specific way — how calls are answered today, who answers them, what the callers actually want, what escalates to a human, what waits for morning. That reality is different for every business, and no self-serve wizard captures it correctly.

What actually happened with self-serve was predictable: buyers deployed agents that sounded right in the demo but broke on the third or fourth real call. They didn't have the time or the technical language to debug the prompt, adjust the escalation rules, or notice that the calendar integration was hitting the wrong provider. And a broken voice agent is worse than no agent at all — every failed call is your customer, your reputation, and your money on the line.

The agents got worse over time. Customers churned. The industry got a little more skeptical of voice AI in general — and rightfully so. Here's the part that sealed the decision for us: self-serve doesn't just fail the customer who bought it. It poisons the category. Every broken agent makes every exhausted business owner a little more certain that "voice AI doesn't work." We'd rather deliver fewer deployments that actually work than flood the market with agents that don't.

What we do instead.

Every engagement now starts with a human. A real person sits down with you, learns how your phones actually work, designs the agent, deploys it, watches the first calls, and iterates before anything scales. That is the pilot — and it's the smallest thing we sell.

"We only deliver voice agents that work — which means we only sell voice agents we've actually built."

Even the pilot is delivered by a human. There is no version of this business we can operate profitably on a $99/month self-serve tier without breaking the product for the customer. So we don't offer one. No checkout page. No pricing-tier roulette. If you want a voice agent that works, you talk to the people who build it.

Where this leaves buyers.

If you were looking for self-serve voice AI, you now have a clearer choice: either you have the internal technical capacity to build and operate a voice agent end-to-end (in which case there are open-source paths and platform APIs available to you), or you should work with a team that will deliver it for you.

We are that team. Not the only one, but a good one. And we'll keep delivering it the way we deliver it now — with humans in the loop, deployment by deployment. "Book a demo" isn't a sales tactic for us. It's the product.

More on how the pilot actually works: read what two weeks of MetisPro looks like, or see the three engagement models.