Keep Your Number: Skip the ₹2,000 Charge

No. There are two workable paths on Dvaarik, and only one of them involves a new number.

Path A — keep your number and forward the calls. Your customers keep dialling the number they already have. A forwarding rule on your line hands those calls to an agent that answers. Because your customers are still dialling your number, the ₹2,000 per 30 days line charge does not apply — you forward to a destination set up as part of your build, and talk-time at ₹2/min is the only usage charge on the voice side.

Path B — take a Dvaarik number and put it where you want it answered. We supply an Indian business number at ₹2,000 per 30 days, covering the number and its first concurrent call line, auto-debited from your credit balance. Your board number stays exactly as it is; the new number goes on your ads, your website and your WhatsApp Business profile.

The two paths can also run together: forward the board number so nothing is missed, and put a separate number on paid campaigns so the ad spend can be measured honestly. Neither path requires porting your number, changing operator, or handing anyone control of it.

GST sits on top of all of this in the same place either way: our prices are quoted exclusive of GST, and 18% applies when you load credits, so a ₹10,000 load is billed ₹11,800 — ₹10,000 usable plus ₹1,800 GST.

Call forwarding is a supplementary service that has existed on GSM networks for decades. You tell the network: when a call arrives for this number under this condition, send it to that number instead. The caller dials your number and never knows.

There are four conditions, and the difference between them is the whole design decision:

• Unconditional — every call goes onward. Your handset does not ring at all.
• When busy — only when you are already on a call. Your first conversation is undisturbed and the second caller still gets answered.
• When there is no answer — after the line has rung for a set time and nobody picked up.
• When unreachable — phone switched off, flight mode, or no coverage.

The last three together are what most owners actually want: you keep answering the calls you can, and only the ones you would have missed go to the agent. The agent becomes a safety net rather than a replacement, which is also the version your regular customers will notice least.

On a handset these live under Settings, usually as "Call forwarding" or "Call diverting", with a separate entry for each condition. They also have standard GSM dial codes: `**21*<number>#` for unconditional, `**67*<number>#` for busy, `**61*<number>#` for no answer, `**62*<number>#` for unreachable, and `##002#` to erase all forwarding.

Here is the caveat that matters more than the codes: whether every one of those works on your line is a question for your operator, not for me. Availability of the conditional variants, whether the setting has to be made in the operator's own app or by calling customer care, and what the network does with a call once it is forwarded, all vary by operator, by circle and sometimes by plan. I have not verified your operator and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

So before you rely on any of this, put four questions to your operator and write the answers down:

1. Does my plan support conditional forwarding — busy, no answer and unreachable separately — or only unconditional forwarding?
2. Is the forwarded leg charged to me? Forwarding creates a second call leg from my number to the destination. Is that included in my pack, or billed, and at what rate?
3. Can I set the no-answer ring timer, and to what values?
4. If this is a landline, PRI or SIP line supplied by a provider, who controls forwarding — me, from an app or portal, or a support ticket to them?

Question two is the one people forget, and it is the only place a genuine surprise can come from. Ask it in writing.

The reason forwarding calms this fear is that almost nothing visible changes. Here is the full list, on both sides.

Two further things do not happen, because owners ask about both.

You do not port your number. Mobile number portability exists for moving a number between operators. Forwarding does not move it anywhere. Your number stays on your operator's network, billed to you, in your name.

You do not hand control over to us. On a mobile line the forwarding rule is set from your own handset or your operator's app, by you, and removed the same way — there is nothing at our end that can set or unset it. If the number terminates on a landline, PRI or SIP trunk from a provider, the switch may sit with whoever supplies that line, which is why that is the fourth question in the list above. Either way the control is not ours, and that cuts both directions: it is also why we cannot fix it for you remotely if it stops working.

One genuine unknown worth naming in advance: whether your network passes the original caller's number through to the forwarded leg varies by network. It decides whether the agent sees who is calling before it says hello. We check it on your first test call rather than promise it beforehand.

Take a business running about 500 billed minutes a month — roughly 250 calls at two billed minutes each. Every figure below is our published rate arithmetic, not a survey and not a claim about what businesses like yours typically spend.

The minimum first credit load is ₹10,000, billed ₹11,800 with 18% GST applied at the point of loading. Everything after that comes out of the one balance: talk-time, the Care Plan, and the number recharge if you take a number. Later top-ups start from ₹500, credits never expire, and at zero balance everything pauses gracefully rather than arriving as a bill.

The free build is a trade and it belongs in the open. We build the agent free for our 10 founding clients in return for two things: the Care Plan for the first three months at the founding rate of ₹5,000/month, and an honest testimonial plus a short case study after go-live. The Care Plan covers monitoring, tuning the agent once you have heard how it really handles your callers, campaign and pricing setup help, a monthly report and priority WhatsApp support direct to me. It is optional from month four. List price is ₹12,000/month and the founding rate is locked for six months, so it is a real discount with a real expiry.

Now the part that is specific to keeping your own number. With no fixed line charge, your talk-time rate stays ₹2/min at every volume, including a quiet month, because there is no fixed charge for a small number of minutes to be averaged over.

Read that table for what it is: talk-time, plus the number recharge on the right-hand path, and nothing else. It deliberately excludes the Care Plan, which is ₹5,000 a month on either path for the first three months. At 200 minutes the Care Plan is the bill and the talk-time is a rounding error — which is the case made against buying at all in the last section of this page.

What the right-hand column shows is what a fixed charge does to any headline per-minute rate at low volume, and it applies to every vendor in this market who charges anything fixed. It bites harder the larger that fixed charge is: Aixclerate published an entry plan of ₹9,999 a month, including 500 minutes, on 21 Jul 2026, against our ₹2,000 per 30 days. It is also the reason forwarding your own number is the honest recommendation for a business whose phone rings a few hundred times a month rather than a few thousand.

Billing is whole-minute and telecom-standard, so a 65-second call bills as two minutes, or ₹4. Build that into your own estimate rather than discover it. The full rate card is at /pricing, and if you want this run against your own call log, /tools/missed-call-calculator does that arithmetic.

Four real limits. None of them is a reason to avoid forwarding; all four are reasons to know what you bought.

Concurrency. Forwarding routes a call, it does not create a second line. An ordinary mobile SIM carries one conversation at a time, so if the agent is already handling a forwarded call and a second customer rings, what happens next is decided by your carrier and connection type, not by us. I cannot price that for you because it is not our line. If two conversations genuinely need to happen at once — and your call log will tell you whether they do — the workable route is a Dvaarik number at ₹2,000 per 30 days, which includes its first concurrent line, with extra concurrent lines at ₹1,500 on the same 30-day cycle. The fuller version of that problem is at /blog/phone-busy-losing-customers-india.

Attribution. If everything funnels through one number, you cannot tell which enquiries your ad spend produced. A separate number rings for exactly one source, which turns campaign reporting from an argument into a count. That is a marketing reason to take a second number, not a technical one.

Outbound is a different product. Forwarding solves inbound only. It does not make our outbound calls appear to come from your number — scheduled callbacks and campaigns run from the number we supply, and they call only your own leads and enquiries: people who rang you, filled your form or clicked your ad. Never a bought, scraped or rented list, at any volume, for any price. In India promotional outbound calling is regulated: telemarketing calls are required to use the designated 140 number series, and subscribers can register DND preferences that block them. Those rules apply to any business number, whoever supplies it.

Lines you do not control. If the number on your board terminates on a landline, a PRI or a SIP trunk from a provider, forwarding may be a change only that provider can make. Find out who holds that switch before you plan around it.

And one non-limit worth stating plainly, because it is the fear underneath the question: if you turn forwarding off, your number behaves exactly as it did before. There is nothing to undo at our end and nothing of yours that has changed hands.

Worth checking before you commit anywhere, because it changes the landed cost substantially. Every cell below was read on the named vendor's own page on 21 Jul 2026, with their own wording kept. Rates in this market moved within weeks during collection, so re-check any row you intend to act on.

Three things this table is deliberately not doing.

It is not converting the USD figures into rupees. Retell publishes no India pricing, and a conversion would be my arithmetic wearing their name.

It is not telling you whether each of these vendors accepts a forwarded call from your existing Indian number. I have not verified that for a single one of them, and inventing it either way would be exactly the kind of claim this page exists to argue against. Ask each vendor directly — the answer tells you a great deal about the product.

And it is not claiming we are the cheapest. Our claim is narrower and checkable: ₹2/min from the very first minute, no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. The full vendor-by-vendor comparison is at /blog/ai-calling-agent-price-india-2026.

In the order that keeps the risk near zero.

1. Decide which calls you are giving away. Everything, or only the ones you would have missed. For most established businesses the answer is the second one: forward on busy, on no answer and when unreachable, and leave unconditional forwarding alone. You keep answering; the agent catches the overflow.

2. Confirm with your operator that those conditions are available on your plan, and whether the forwarded leg is charged. Get it in writing. This is the only step where a surprise can live.

3. We build the agent and give you a destination to forward to. Built around your real prices, your hours and the questions your customers actually ask — not a template with your name dropped into it.

4. Set the rule, then test it deliberately. Ring your number from another phone and let it ring out. Ring it while you are on a call. Ring it with your handset switched off. Then ring it and pick up normally, and confirm that call never left your hand. Four tests, five minutes, and you know exactly what your customers will experience.

5. Argue with the agent before you trust it. The live demo is at app.dvaarik.com/dvaarik-ai. Interrupt it, switch language halfway through, give it a name it has never heard, and speak the way your customers really speak with your shop noise behind you. Five minutes of that beats this entire page.

6. Keep the rollback in your pocket. Removing forwarding puts your number back exactly as it was. On most GSM networks `##002#` erases all forwarding rules; confirm the correct code with your operator when you ask them the questions above, and save it in your phone before you need it.

More on the mechanics of the phone side is at /features/phone.

Five situations where I would tell you to keep your money. I would rather lose the enquiry than have you work it out in month two.

1. Your calls are already being answered. If someone picks up reliably within your working hours, calls rarely overlap, and nobody rings you after you close, you do not have this problem. Do not buy an agent to solve a problem you do not have.

2. Your operator only offers unconditional forwarding on your plan. Then it is all-or-nothing: every call leaves your handset, including the ones you wanted to take yourself. Some owners are happy with that. If you are not, a separate number published on ads and your website is the better shape, and your board number keeps working exactly as it does today.

3. You need two or three conversations happening at once. Forwarding cannot manufacture capacity on a single mobile SIM. That is a supplied number with concurrent lines, at ₹2,000 per 30 days plus ₹1,500 per extra line on the same cycle — and it is worth checking your call log first to see whether calls genuinely overlap or just feel like they do.

4. Your real question is which ads are working. One number cannot answer that. A separate number per source can, and no amount of forwarding gets you there.

5. You are under roughly 200 billed minutes a month. At that volume — around a hundred calls — ₹400 of talk-time sits under a ₹5,000 Care Plan in months one to three, and the fixed part of the arrangement is doing all the work. That is honest value only if those hundred calls are worth real money to you, as they are for a clinic or a dealer and are not for many shops. A clearer voicemail greeting and a person who returns calls at 6pm may serve you better this year. Come back when the phone is genuinely beating you.

And a sixth, which is not about price: if what you need is ring groups, call distribution across a team, IVR trees, seat-level reporting and a supervisor view, that is cloud telephony and you should buy cloud telephony. We do not build that. The distinction is set out at /blog/cloud-telephony-vs-ai-voice-agent-india.

Everything, with nothing held back for a sales call.

Where a fuller voice menu is warranted, the choices on one account are Bharat Standard ₹2/min, Studio HD ₹3/min, Global covering 99 languages ₹4–5/min, and Ultra realtime ₹10/min. These are voice-quality choices, not subscription tiers, and the advertised base is always ₹2/min.

The sentence worth quoting anywhere: ₹2/min from the very first minute — no subscription, no minimum volume, no lock-in. The only commitment that exists is the three-month Care Plan the free founding build is traded against, and it is on this page rather than in a contract you read later.

One charge is not on this table because it is not ours: whatever your operator does or does not bill for the forwarded leg. Ask them, get it in writing, and add it to your own arithmetic.

If you want this priced against your own call volume and your own number, tell us your problem on WhatsApp at +91 93923 98750. The numbers on this page are the numbers you will be quoted.