OpenAI Shipped Your Voice Stack at $0.25/Min. Vapi Went Enterprise. The Infra Layer Abandoned Agencies in Eleven Days.

On May 7, OpenAI made gpt-realtime-2 generally available in the Realtime API at roughly $0.25 to$0.35 per minute of conversation, with GPT-5-class reasoning, 128K context, native translation, and 70+ languages. Coverage: TechCrunch , OpenAI's announcement , and a clean teardown at DataCamp . Five days later, on May 12, Vapi closed a $50M Series B at a$500M valuation and publicly positioned itself as the enterprise infrastructure layer , with Amazon Ring running 100% of inbound through them. Tw