A cloud phone has everything except a radio. This is the radio — a router that carries an instance's calls and messages over a physical SIM, so the app inside dials, texts and receives exactly as it would on hardware in someone's hand.
What actually happens
The instance never touches the SIM, and the machine holding the SIM never touches a provider credential. Everything meets at the router.
So the relay inside the instance stops the attempt and reports it here. The router hands it to the SIM bound to that instance and places the call for real — then writes the call back into the instance's own log, so the app that placed it sees what happened instead of nothing at all.
The agent on the host machine reports it, and the router injects it into every instance bound to that SIM. It arrives in the inbox the way a message is supposed to — not in a webhook an app inside the instance would never think to read.
The default is no
Three gates, each independent. Any one of them closed and the traffic stops at the router rather than leaking onto a network it was not meant for.
The router holds the provider credentials. A host machine never sees a key, so a machine with a SIM in it cannot reach the cloud phones directly — not even the one it is serving.
An instance and the SIM it is bound to must both be approved and enabled. A new SIM shows up for approval rather than starting to carry traffic.
An agent can only act on instances bound to hardware it hosts. Knowing an instance's code is not enough to reach it or route through it.
Metered by pairing
Not for API calls, not for minutes, not for instances sitting idle. Binding an instance to a SIM is the thing that costs something, because it is the thing that makes it a phone.
Billing follows each pairing's own end date rather than a calendar tick, so a restart or a missed run delays a charge — it never skips one and never bills it twice. Unbinding stops the meter; the month already paid for runs to the end.
The console is where instances are brought into inventory, allocated to an account, paired with a SIM, and watched. Access is by operator token.
Hosting a SIM does not happen here — that runs in the desktop app, on the machine the SIM is in.