We deployed phone systems for years. Kahevo is what we learned.
We are an IT company in Hawaiʻi. Businesses here count on us to keep their computers, networks and phones working. Kahevo is the phone system we built after deploying many others and seeing where each one fell short.
What went wrong with the phone systems we resold.
We tried four kinds. Each one let our customers down in its own special way, and each time all we could do was apologize.
The price and the product kept changing
A PBX you install on your own server, licensed by how many calls can run at once.
We built our phone business on it, and then the terms changed under us. Licenses we had paid for once became subscriptions we had to renew every year. Features our customers were already using were moved to a higher edition, so keeping them meant paying more. Then the prices rose. Each time, we were the ones explaining it to the customer.
No support, and no room for us
The phone service sold by the video meeting company.
Support tickets sat for weeks. And the customer was never really ours: they signed up under the vendor's account and paid the vendor's price, and we were paid a small commission for the introduction.
A contract with no way out
The big cloud phone company.
Signing took a day. The contract ran for years and renewed itself for the same number of years unless we canceled in writing at exactly the right time. A customer who left early paid for every month remaining.
Free, until you needed it to work
The free, open-source PBX with a web interface on top.
Getting one office running took days of forums and configuration files. The parts an office actually needs, such as setting up desk phones, were paid add-ons with a yearly renewal, and closed source besides. In September 2026 its owner agreed to be sold to a holding company, and the people who run it are asking what comes next.
This is what happened to us. Other IT companies and their customers have described the same things publicly.
Before Kahevo, there was Pidgin Talk.
Kahevo did not start from a blank page. It grew out of an older project of ours, with a much smaller job.
- 2022: the ground shifts. The popular PBX vendors began changing their terms and raising what a license cost. For a small office the numbers stopped working: too expensive for the customer, or no longer worth it for the IT company looking after them.
- A small answer for small offices. We wrote Pidgin Talk and put it to work for businesses with simple needs: about ten phones, calls in and calls out, and no advanced features at all.
- The root of Kahevo. Pidgin Talk is where Kahevo comes from. What you see today is that small project, grown into a complete phone system.
So we built Kahevo.
It is a complete business phone system: desk phones, a phone in the browser, the mobile app, voicemail, fax, texting, menus and call routing. We host it for you, or run it on a small server in your office.
There is no license for the phone system to renew and no faraway vendor to wait on. Kahevo is in production at many sites today, our own customers' among them, and what it does next is decided by the businesses that use it.
Andrew Liu Business Partner Coordinator Ask Andrew about Kahevo for your business
- Jakub WójcikChannel Partner Manager
- Hiromi UedaLead Developer
The name
Kāhea + voice, with a hint of evolution.
Kāhea
Hawaiian for to call, or to call out to someone. It is the oldest thing a phone system does: one person calls, and another answers.
Voice
What every call carries. Kahevo's job is to get a voice from one person to another clearly, and to stay out of the way.
Evolution
The "evo" at the end. It is where the phone system goes next, steered by the people who run it and not by a license.
What working on an island taught us.
Hawaiʻi is 2,400 miles of open ocean from the nearest vendor's office, and nobody is driving over. That distance is why Kahevo is built the way it is.
Nobody is coming to fix it
Out here you cannot wait on a vendor, so the person on site has to be able to solve it. Kahevo shows what is connected on every page and writes what went wrong to a log in plain words.
Your customers are your neighbors
We see ours at the grocery store, at the beach and at every graduation party. A phone system that fails them is our name on the line, so we tell people what Kahevo cannot do yet as plainly as what it can.
Small offices are most of the work
Most businesses here have five to fifty people, one router and one internet line. Kahevo is built for that office first, on modest hardware, without a network specialist.
What we promise your business.
These are the promises we wished our old phone vendors had made our customers. We take them as our kuleana, our responsibility.
No phone system license to lapse
Nothing in Kahevo checks a license before it takes a call, so a renewal date can never take your phones down.
Your records stay yours
Recordings, voicemail and call history belong to your business, and go with you if you ever leave.
Someone local answers
Call us and you reach the people who set your phones up, in Honolulu, on Hawaiʻi time.
Straight answers
We tell you what Kahevo cannot do yet as plainly as what it can, before you move, not after.
Look after phones for other businesses? Kahevo for MSPs is free to offer.
Talk to the people who wrote it.
Ask us anything about Kahevo, or about moving your phones to it. We like to talk story.