Thanks for the suggestion, we'll add a pricing page that doesn't require logging in. The "starting price" is just the price of our cheapest numbers (pricing varies by country). We maybe should think of a less scammy-sounding way to describe that.

The Unicode symbols for flags consist of a special set of combining country-code letters that when used in two-character combinations compose into flags. That solution ensures that the Unicode standard doesn't hard-code the existing list of countries and country codes. In addition to future-proofing, that also avoids dealing with disputed regions that not everyone recognizes as countries.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol .

I parse those as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes:

AU AT BE CL CZ EE FI FR DE HK HU IE IL LT NL NO PL SE CH GB

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Turns out they're in alpha order by country name, too.

Thanks for the heads up! We'll find a more widely-compatible way to do the flags than using plain Unicode characters.

It's on the roadmap, but we need to integrate with another provider to support them. Most major communications services that verify your number don't mind which country it's from, but we realise there are good use cases for having a number from a specific country.

Sure! At the moment we integrate with the Twilio API for our numbers, although we have a few more providers on the way. We don't offer all countries that Twilio does because we test the numbers out to make sure they work with most services before whitelisting a country to appear on our service. Our software is written in Rust and uses the Iron framework for the webapp. PostgreSQL keeps the records. nginx sits in front.

Probably using a service like Twilio.

It depends on the country the number belongs to, and sometimes on the specific number, but we only list countries where we've tested a few numbers from that country and found they work with most services. We can't guarantee anything about which services will or won't accept our numbers, but we only bill by the minute so it's very cheap to try it out and cancel after a minute or two if it doesn't work out.