Show HN: Pay-per-minute video/audio calls with WebRTC | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pay-per-minute video/audio calls with WebRTC

eagledial.com

47 pointsdanieka40 comments

I was interested in your service and decided to create an account. I stopped when I read your "Terms of Service" and noticed this provision:

4. EXCLUSIVE USE OF FLIFFR 4.1 For clients acquired through EagleDial, Provider agrees to exclusively use EagleDial and the Platform for live services. When providing live services, Provider agrees to solely use EagleDial. Provider may not use EagleDial with the objective of recruiting new clients for physical or telephone meetings.

Who/What is 'FLIFFR'? Why do I need to use your services exclusively? :|

Fliffr is a previous brand of our company, we used the same ToS and obviously didn't replace all references. Thanks for spotting that mistake.

There's a typo on the buyer facing signup form: 'Agree to the Terms of Servie'.

Are there any plans to 'whitelabel' or offer a method of integration aside from requiring buyer to visit your site?

Yes, actually that's something we are working on, we've nothing the web page yet since the offering isn't set in stone. But anyone interested in a whitelabel can contact me at danielk@eagledial.com

I’m not 100% sure but do you have to support the connection? If the call goes from one peer to the other and never touches your server why is there a fee per minute?

It sounds like the recipient charges callers per minute, and the service takes a 20% commission.

Yes, that's right.

So 20% commission to basically provide billing?

The company I work for charges a 6% "service fee" to run credit cards for me and that's at the high end of reasonable. Though they also will cancel your contract if you use something like square but I think that's mostly for the customers' benefit so they don't have to worry about dodgy charges and not because they really want the 6%.

All in all they usually get a lot more than 20% of my gross income (unless I have a really good day) but they provide almost everything I need to do my job.

It all depends on what you're comparing against. For you I can imagine that we'd be a bad fit. We're actually going after those that now operate premium-rate numbers. They usually pay a lot more than 20% to their providers (it's difficult to say exactly since they have very complex pricing schemes).

You're business has to be centered around charging for calls in order for EagleDial to make sense. But for those use cases we believe we provide a lot of value.

edit: I'd be happy to hear more about what you do, and how we can improve EagleDial. Please send me an email on danielk@eagledial.com if you're interested in talking more.

FWIW I'd love to see the UI from the buyer (callers) side even if it's just screenshots.

+1. I immediately wonder what the experience is like for my customers. Do they have to enter credit card data before they can call me? That sounds like a hurdle I don't always want to put in front of them.

Thank you for the feedback. Right now they have to enter credit card details before calling.

Every time?

Customers have the option of saving their credit card details.

what is the business model here? Sorry, I am confused here and website is not explaining it correctly.

I dont see what kind of "premium numbers" are available. Why would someone pay to talk to me?

would the caller have to register and provide CC number?

Is this call-back model which was used few years back on some website where some voice companies would offer call-back option from website (I think it used java that time) and it would cost per minute.

Webcam/Phone sex?

What are the business cases for needing this sort of service, i.e., who are your customers likely to be? Who are you selling to that need t to charge their customers for calling them?

Our goal is to replace the premium-rate phone number. So tech support, therapists, coaches, astrology and tarot stuff etc.

Hi, co-founder of EagleDial here. This is the first version of our MVP, so if you have any feedback we’d really appreciate it.

I can enter “pricing” and “contact” and get to at least the next step. I haven’t tried actually registering them. You should probably ban such things, maybe some others you’d like to reserve too.

I haven’t tried circumventing the client-side restrictions on which characters are allowed at all, but the content shown at pages like https://eagledial.com/robots.txt makes me wonder. I don’t imagine it lets me put just anything into the page, so it’s probably not an attack vector (e.g. being able to register .well-known/acme-challenge things and get a TLS certificate for the domain, or convincing Google that you own the site via a site verification page at /google*.html), but something to think about and be careful of.

All of your “Follow Us” links have an empty href.

Angular favicon.ico.

Yes, that's good feedback, thank you. As you noted we don't ban any names. It sounds like a good idea to block "special names".

https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames is a list that could be a good starting point

Interesting resource. I was surprised to see "m" as the only single-letter reserved name. Would've guessed at least "v" as well.

Why 'm' and 'v' ?

For services that put the username as a sub domain

m.example.com looks like a mobile URL for main site

Interesting business idea, I would like to give it a try but I honestly was expecting screenshots or some short gif/video on how it works (instead of the pink icons with their descriptions). Also, I assume it could be useful for consultants and such but maybe you could actually suggest some use cases so people realize quicker why/how it could benefit them business-wise. I found the concept interesting because I know the tech but my friends and relatives would not understand the lingo at a first glance.

Thanks for the feedback, you make good points. We'll make sure to incorporate it in our next version.

Congratulations, it looks like you've built something really awesome! Going with WebRTC and peer-to-peer should save you a ton of money. Since your service works 24/7, your service seems a lot better than Clarity.fm, and your revenue cut is quite reasonable. I hate to nitpick, but you've got a typo on your home page at "receive you earnings". Best of luck!... It looks like you're going to be a big success.

Thanks for your kind words, and for the feedback :)

It says the calls are end to end encrypted but I thought WebRTC do not have E2E encryption. I would gladly see some technical details there.

We’ll do a write-up on the website in the future. In short the calls are encrypted between browsers. We do not have a PKI so we can not client-side check for MITM attacks, but of course we authenticate clients server-side. So, calls are encrypted end-to-end but also places faith in that our infrastructure is not compromised.

I'm mostly interested in whether it's only signaling that's E2E encrypted or audio/video peer to peer streams between the browsers.

Cool! Small nitpicks: the link that's shown to you after you create a link doesn't work; it refers to eaglelink.com instead of eagledial.com. Also, perhaps you could make the error messages (e.g. "That link is already registered") red? I didn't notice them at first.

Thank you for the feedback :)

Amazing idea. On Chrome Android the extended virtual keyboard seems to mess up the layout. You can test this in development in chrome desktop in the dev console's mobile view.

Also, clicking 'next step' doesn't seem to work for me. Good luck!

Thanks, I'll take a look at it!

Edit: Next step works now

Is WebRTC usable in iOS Safari with 2-way audio? Both playing and recording caused certain distortions, probably related to the audio sample rate.

The linked page (the lander) is kind of a mess on mobile, overlapping text and general chaos.

“All Rights Reselved” in the footer.

Thanks :)

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