• Self-contained HTTP API. Everything — placing calls, authorising inbound calls, receiving CDRs, managing trunks and routes — happens over one small HTTP contract. Any service can drive it, in any language, with zero coupling to the rest of your stack.
• You own the media, end to end. Strowger holds the whole RTP path itself — nothing to wire up between boxes, no glue layer to babysit. A whole class of plumbing bugs is gone by construction.
• Sovereign, on-prem. CDRs, recordings, transcripts and signalling never leave your infrastructure. Conversation audio goes to exactly one third party — the AI model provider you choose, under your own keys and your own DPA.
• Hard-won audio lessons, encoded as requirements. Playout buffering, full-duplex barge-in, RTP watchdogs, session timers — months of production telephony debugging are design constraints here, not discoveries left for you to make again.

Strowger is a Cargo workspace of reusable crates — sip, media, ai, call, httpd — assembled into the single strowgerd daemon binary. Each crate is usable as a library on its own; together they form the process that answers and places calls on your behalf. A companion tool, strowger-cli, talks to that daemon over the same HTTP API to administer it locally.