When a support line hit 1,237 calls in a single hour on March 12th, our 80‑line bridge kept every caller under 1.2 seconds of AI latency. Why 80 Lines? The Hidden Cost of Boilerplate The 4× budget blowout Most teams start with a handful of Twilio webhook handlers, then sprinkle in retry loops, audio transcoding, and secret management. By the time the script swells past 200 lines, you’re paying for every extra Lambda invocation, every additional IAM policy, and the hidden engineering hours spent debugging state leaks. A 2023 survey of 112 SaaS developers found a 38 % higher cloud spend when their Twilio‑GPT integration exceeded 200 lines, similar to what we documented in our production voice AI . The real culprit isn’t the compute; it’s the “glue” code that never makes it into the product roadmap. A fintech startup I consulted for blew $4,200/mo on Lambda invocations after their webhook grew to 312 lines. The same functionality, trimmed to 80 lines, would have cost under $1,000. Latency vs.…