Everybody has volume discounts; Twilio is nice and scalable and their rates aren't bad at all.
Putting my marketing hat on, I'd strongly suggest Patio11's blog on inbound marketing. He's really good and the points he make are dead on (the big marketers are basically doing the same thing except paying Marketo and Hubspot for automation).
I think it would be difficult to do 5000 participants in a conf call on stock freeswitch boxes, but we've done over 20k using Kazoo (Which leverages FreeSWITCH as the media server). Our secret sauce is an abstraction layer and custom freeswitch modules for distributed scaling. When you get over a few hundred participants in a conference call you're always doing some sort of bridging between boxen and when you chain lots and lots of boxes together keeping state across the cluster becomes a challenge. We've done a lot of work handling distributed state in conferences; it was a pain.
If you want us to host something like that for you, drop me a line in my inbox. Contact info in my profile (we're also open-source if you wanna get your hands dirty).
Please note: Kazoo (our stack) is built for carrier deployments, and requires a minimum of 8 servers for full redundancy. You can get by with as few as two but full redundancy requires 8 (and is thus our recommended minimum configuration). But it does have all of the stuff you've mentioned and you don't need beefy hardware to do it either.
Putting my marketing hat on, I'd strongly suggest Patio11's blog on inbound marketing. He's really good and the points he make are dead on (the big marketers are basically doing the same thing except paying Marketo and Hubspot for automation).
I think it would be difficult to do 5000 participants in a conf call on stock freeswitch boxes, but we've done over 20k using Kazoo (Which leverages FreeSWITCH as the media server). Our secret sauce is an abstraction layer and custom freeswitch modules for distributed scaling. When you get over a few hundred participants in a conference call you're always doing some sort of bridging between boxen and when you chain lots and lots of boxes together keeping state across the cluster becomes a challenge. We've done a lot of work handling distributed state in conferences; it was a pain.
If you want us to host something like that for you, drop me a line in my inbox. Contact info in my profile (we're also open-source if you wanna get your hands dirty).
Please note: Kazoo (our stack) is built for carrier deployments, and requires a minimum of 8 servers for full redundancy. You can get by with as few as two but full redundancy requires 8 (and is thus our recommended minimum configuration). But it does have all of the stuff you've mentioned and you don't need beefy hardware to do it either.