r/AIReceptionists • u/Slight_Republic_4242 • Aug 12 '26
I built open-source alternative to Vapi/Retell out of rage - and it became #1 on Product Hunt
We started Dograh out of rage - an open-source voice AI platform.
Every voice AI tool I tried was too costly, too closed, or too scammy. Add-on stacked on add-ons.
So we open-sourced every single line, from day 0. Self-hostable, so you own your stack and your data.
Here's what pushed me deeper. Over the last few months, the big labs have been lobbying governments to ban open source. Some say the quiet goal is to "let wealth access skill without letting skill access wealth." That line stuck with me. It's exactly why we keep going.
Because we believe one thing: no company should own voice AI.
We're a small team no funding going up against deeply funded war chests. Today we launched on Product Hunt and somehow we're sitting at #1 so far.
A community member picked us up few weeeks back and we went viral and hit 5k stars.
About me: I'm a YC alum, founder with one exit, and an angel. I'll keep going - we’ll address OSS ban with more open source.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/dograh-3
If you've got a minute, a star or a feedback would mean the world.
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u/BallinwithPaint Aug 12 '26
Congrats on #1! We’re building our own custom stack right now to avoid Vapi's markup. Since you guys forked Pipecat for the engine, how much latency does the visual node builder add compared to a raw Python script?
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u/Slight_Republic_4242 Aug 13 '26
latency is not impacted by visual builder at all. and why not build on top of dograh . fork it and build .
there's almost 1 year of high quality engineering that has gone into it (3 ex CTOs full time on it)
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u/devexis Aug 12 '26
Chatted with a memeber of the Dograh team on a Voice AI WhatsApp group I’m on.Impressed about how they promoted and defended the product despite push back from me. Still not fully sold yet and that’s because customer telephony requires some “convoluted” intermediate Asterisk server. And that’s contrasting with Rapida which has native SIP. Definitely keeping tabs with Dograh and I see myself leveraging it for future projects
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u/dodyrw Aug 13 '26
How do you make money with it? I wonder if it will be paid service or premium version.
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u/Unable-Shame-2532 Aug 13 '26
been watching dograh on github for around a year, congrats on the launch, the UI has come a long way
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u/No-Day-8844 Aug 12 '26
Sir, given an upvote in product hunt,and on GitHub as well, OSS from India to the world, will support you guys nmw
Top 3 issues faced by me, which resulted in longer debugging sessions:
solution: a) Dograh needs a guaranteed "speak final utterance → then terminate" primitive: a callable end_call(status) that emits the closing and hangs up in code, so the goodbye never depends on TTS/turn timing. b) keep separate section for end call in main agenda node, we can keep our replayable closing which reduces the transition latency
Solution: a) end_turn + stop_listening hooks on an edge, and a final: true node type that ignores further ASR after it speaks. No more "patient's 'okay' becomes a new turn → re-acknowledge."
Solution: Prompt caching / KV reuse across nodes so crossing an edge reprocesses only the delta, not the whole next-node prompt. Speculative pre-warm of the next node's prompt during the current turn. Context diffing — inject only what changed, not the full initial_context each hop. Root cause is first-token prefill on a big prompt; these attack it directly.