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Comment by gregorymichael | Hacker News Reader

Greg from Twilio here.

Totally understand the concern there, especially since you're already paying for your cellphone.

I did something similar a couple years ago when we were shopping for a car. A lot of car shopping sites are basically lead generators for dealerships and you need to provide a number to get real info. I used a Twilio number forwarded to my cellphone.

The deluge of calls started immediately. After 48 hours, when we had all the information we needed, I released the Twilio number and incurred no further charges.

Total cost was $1 (per month) for the phone number and $0.01 per minute for the inbound calls. Upside was that my phone stopped ringing the moment I was done talking to salesmen.

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Doesn't this use case eventually screw over any future Twilio customer that selects that number? I see several inbound calls to my Twilio number from random numbers that I have to pay for, even though I'm only using Twilio in a development capacity right now. Do you guys "expire" numbers from your pool that receive aggressive amounts of Inbound traffic (voice, fax, or SMS)?

At some point a few years back, my VW dealership sold my phone number to people for vehicle service contracts. Even though I sold that car 4 years ago, I STILL get at least 2-3 calls per week from different companies offering to sell me an extended warranty. How does Twilio mitigate that for us?

(Off topic, but seriously, thanks for Twilio. Ping me if you want to know how we're using it in our new startup [email in profile]. It's pretty rad.)

It absolutely does. Twilio should provide usage history on the phone #. The best predictor of future undesired/spam calls is prior call volume. The use case described sets up terrible downstream effects.

A number having high usage history does not necessarily mean it still is being used. Providing these numbers to the customer is a neat idea, but since they only provide an indicator for how it _was_ used they won't have much value. It might also be a bad PR move since users will draw conclusions from that history that might not be true.

Really good question.

Just wrote a lengthy reply to this concern up above, but the tl;dr is that we sit on all numbers for at least 2 months and wait until there's an acceptably low amount of inbound traffic before releasing them back into the available number pool.

Would love to hear how you're using us. Will drop you an email. (And thank you!)

Do the numbers being held register as disconnected to anyone calling them? It seems like that might cut down on some of the junk calls by the time they're released.

So what you're saying is this tutorial was written by a twilio sales/marketing employee?

..it's own twilio.com, so isnt it transparently promoting twilio?

Or is your comment about sales versus engineers?

If their salespeople know how to fire up a little endpoint in kotlin using their API that's fantastic.

Marcos Placona is a Developer Evangelist.

I missed that this was on twilio. Fair enough

It's on the Twilio.com blog, so I think that it is pretty reasonable to assume that it's written by a Twilio employee. :-)

I'm still waking up... :/

Stick it to the Man!

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