Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio

thisnumber.rocks

134 pointshme62 comments

Doesn't look good. Remember, you're giving this unknown business the power to snoop on your phone calls. Do you want to open that back door?

No visible privacy policy. No visible pricing information. Not good.

Twilio can do this without any help from these guys.[https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets].

That's my first thought. Why not just do it yourself? Especially when twimlets are around.

I built my Call Forwarding app using Plivo. It was pretty straight forward to use. https://www.plivo.com/docs/getting-started/forward-an-incomi... is their official documentation on Call Forwarding. Also, every user gets a pre-built Call Forwarding which requires you just add the numbers for testing which looks like this - http://callforward.herokuapp.com/forward/?Numbers=NUMBER_1_H...

More importantly, why would you want to call your "real" numbers sequentially by default? You might prefer hitting all of them simultaneously, which is also trivial as everyone else here has mentioned.

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2009/05/dialing-multiple-numbers...

Why is there no information on the costs or requirements? It seems the only possible way to find out is to sign up, which requires providing an email address...

Try the demo account I created. Username / password = l1647751@mvrht.com / l1647751@mvrht.com.

Here's a link to the setup tutorial too:

https://www.thisnumber.rocks/tutorial

Some things that need fixing:

- I could just create an account with nothing entered on the password field and could also login to that account that way.

- https://thisnumber.rocks/ is not being pointed to this same app.

That link you posted gives me a cert error.

Confirmed; source of the error appears to be the domain for the cert and the one using it are not the same domain.

Thanks ! I'll fix this.

Official solution https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223179908-Setti...

If you don't need the opening hour logic, you can already achieve this will Twilio's Twimlets.

Wow, I've never heard of Twimlets; very cool! Thanks for sharing!

Twilio has something called "Twimlets" that make setting this up very very simple. For voicemail you simply have to create a separate "twimlet" and have the resulting URL attached to the other one you use for the forwarding.

Yes, we string a couple of Twimlets together to direct people to support or general inquiry phone lines. Works really well. No problems in 3+ years.

The menu one in particular: https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/menu

I love that Twilio rolled Twimlets into the dashboard instead of making it a separate site.

Full disclosure: I'm an early (and former) employee @ Twilio

you dont need to say full disclosure...

you can just tell people you used to work at twilio.

We use a twimlet for our business number. It simply plays a recording directing people to our support web page and email (phone support would be too expensive). A surprising number of places need a phone number; for example, Stripe includes it in the charge description.

Years ago one of my clients had an internal system like this... it tried numbers in sequence... but the problem was for the person who dialed in this meant very long wait times if the first person or two weren't responsive. Also we hit issues where the message would end up in someone's personal voicemail box.

Then we switched to more of a "ring all the lines at once and the first one who picked up got the call" -- much better for the person dialing in... but meant every one of our support people got distracted every time the phone rang... they hated it.

Eventually we just went back to something like ZenDesk for customers to write in to create tickets, and then expanded it to something more like what Apple does... where the user creates a request to be called back at a certain time. This is what the client still uses. It's a better system for everyone than trying to sort out incoming calls in real-time.

But now it's bad for the customer again. When they need help, they are ready to call and get their problem solved now, not at some point later in the day.

If you're Amazon/Apple/eBay and the "call me on my phone" allows 1-5 minute time windows to being called, that makes sense, but if the customer is sitting around for 10+ minutes you've already frustrated them.

Isn't this exactly what Google Voice does?

Yes, it is.

Is this like DNS for a Twilio number? That's what I get. If I misunderstand could you fill out more, as if so this could be useful for contingency planning.

It's more like DNS using Twilio. It's analogous to Google Voice.

How is this any different from Google Voice?

Looks like this is "bring your own number". It's neat, but I wouldn't trust this site to stay up under any kind of stress, which means my number would be erratically dead. If the source is available though, this is neat enough I'd consider self-hosting it.

It's hosted on a paid Heroku instance, our own company number is served by this. The server didn't break a sweat with this HN traffic.

That's not reassuring. It's a free service that could shut down at any time. It's lovely, but I would never use it directly for anything serious unless I could pay for it.

it's available in more countries than the US

This looks neat! BTW (shameless plug), for anyone using a Twilio number for voice and wishing to easily add SMS functionality, I created https://www.smsinbox.net last year.

That's something I've been looking for, however $75 a month? Ouch!!

It's largely aimed at software companies using Twilio in their own offerings--I hadn't given much thought to personal use before. What would you consider a fair price?

Shameless plug (UK only): https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/call-handling/divert-forwa...

I don't understand how you make money, which makes it look like there's going to be hidden costs. If I start at https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/memorable-business-number/... and choose, for example, a revenue generating number then go to the payment it says I get a free number that diverts to my phone for no up-front cost and zero monthly fee. So how does that work for you?

Ah, hang on the slide-away at the side says £10, whilst the "STEP 5" says £0. Looks like there might be an issue with your business logic?

[FF51 on Ubuntu.]

On that particular number type the caller pays to call so we take a cut of the call charge, hence revenue generating. Also, only the one and two star numbers are free.

Which combo did you select to get the £10 and £0?

How is this different from the hundreds of VOIP services out there?

You keep control over your number, which you bought on Twilio.

You control the number of Google Voice and it has the same features too and is free. Clearly if you wanted to use Twillio platform with the same number there are things Google Voice could not do, but as is, I don't see the difference. What is the difference?

I don't live in the US, so Google Voice is not available, and I don't know much about it. Using Twilio seems right to me, because it's basically a low level phone number provider, you don't feel that locked.

Yes, that's correct, here's Twillio's information on international support: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223183068-Twili...

And a Google Voice support covering the topic too: https://support.google.com/voice/forum/AAAAjq5-_rMgML2a7pJrj...

This one is new, so they haven't learned all the corner cases that make VoIP more difficult than anticipated.

> This one is new, so they haven't learned all the corner cases that make VoIP more difficult than anticipated.

No need to be rude. This is Show HN. Sharing first attempts is the whole point.

What based on the use case provided [1] would the the number one most likely edge-case and what is the most common solution to it?

Making a claim without constructive supporting points is usually not useful and worst appears you may know nothing other than how to cause problems seeding doubt.

[1] Use-Case: Create a virtual number on Twilio and whenever someone calls, a list of real numbers will be tried sequentially. You can set up opening hours. If nobody answers, a voicemail is recorded and sent to you by email.

I don't think this qualifies as VOIP. It's not even POTS or mobile. It is just an interface for an API.

Although with that said... knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day.

>>knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day.

I don't want to shit on the idea, but with the amount of "build this thing with twilio" content twilio puts out, the benefit of this is saving the time of setting something similar up for yourself.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to debate buy vs. build. Although if I was going to buy there are much more robust services also built on-top of Twilio.

Just the op asked "what makes this different" and I was pointing out that the barrier of entry is very low.

With that said, if you already know the Twilio API and you already know AWS Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB it might be worth it to build because:

1. It would be extensible for your needs.

2. It would be a heck of a lot of fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Edit: I can speak to point #2 personally. I have done it. It is a lot of fun... especially for a developer who usually lives in a web browser... to be able to call a phone number and hear the result of your code. It is very satisfying. Much like building an Alexa skill is or finally getting that LED display to light up on your breadboard and print something.

>> It is a lot of fun... especially for a developer who usually lives in a web browser... to be able to call a phone number and hear the result of your code.

That really is the key. I've built some stuff with twilio simply because the delivery method of my code is somewhat unique.

What is your strategy for when Twilio goes away?

Not OP, but I am honestly curious to know why you think they will go anywhere soon. Could you please elaborate?

I don't. But building a business that depends on another like this, you need to have a backup plan, yes?

I too would like to know what the thought behind this question is. They are a well established company that runs 2FA and awesome phone apis / systems for thousands of startups and large companies in a field that is high barrier of entry (less competition) and predictable profits since they meter their usage.

The only thing I can think of is if a competitor enters the space and blows them away. In which case, there is your answer, you go to whomever blew them away.

I can't imagine a lawsuits or something like that taking them down at this point. They have been around too long, it would have happened already.

Adding to my own post (and thinking out-loud)... I can potentially imagine an acquisition and the acquiring company deciding to shut it down.

But the chances of that are so remote I'd still feel comfortable putting mission critical systems on it.

While not exactly the same thing, people didn't think Parse was going to shut down ... until it did.

Awesome well done @hme Big fan of services that plug into your own billing system (rather than acting as a proxy).

Isn't this part of what twilio does already?

Such thing can be created in a few lines of JavaScript code via Voximplant

BTW, anyone interested in a tutorial? I can create one.

Dropbox is just an FTP server.

I'm not saying this will be the next Dropbox, but dismissing products so offhandedly because you underestimate the average user's aversion to "writing a few lines of Javascript" is silly.

Yes, go ahead, write the tut.

Op got downvoted a lot (and perhaps deserves it because of the tone of his post) but makes a valid point.

This is nothing like dropbox. This is barely a hello world app on the Twilio platform. I have little doubt he could write a tutorial to walk people through it in an hour two two.

This would be a good analogy if you dropbox was literally just provisioning a user and setting an FTP password. And if it was, Dropbox would hit scaling problems on almost day one.

This won't hit scaling problems because it doesn't do anything... Twilio's API has built-in API calls for all this stuff and the webhooks can (and should) be hosted on AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions for pretty much free with automatic scaling.

It's actually a feature. It saved you one day of your life. And if this free service just disappears some day, you are just one day away to build your own. You got your number from Twilio, there is no lock-in.

Personally if I built this I would probably open source it. Then anyone can run it. Although I suspect this is just a marketing ploy for http://aworldforus.com/ or they built it for their own use and decided to release it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com