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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

No mention of that fact that 'use another phone number' is quite an expensive thing to do in countries where a phone number has an annual fee of hundreds of dollars.

Suddenly 'use twitter securely' has gone from 'free' to 'hundreds of dollars a year'. Perhaps they should announce this as a price change instead?

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If you know the right providers it's about $2/month for a non-VOIP, physical SIM to receive SMS for this sort of garbage.

Would be super interested in hearing more about where you could find such a deal _with a physical SIM_. Seems far too good to be true.

Many "IOT" providers give physical numbers for almost no cost, and they provide physical SIM cards for the service. The aren't VOIP so aren't blocked by twilio, etc for use with Twitter and other services.

Any examples of providers?

Hologram.io or Twilio

These and even much smaller providers are usually known to spammers. I've had poor luck with them.

You can sign up for a Twitter account with a Twilio number? I'd be surprised

I used Red Pocket, which comes down to about 2.50/month if you buy a prepaid card on eBay: https://www.redpocket.com/plans/annual

These phone number blocks have usually been utilized by spammers in the past. A lot of them don't work.

Anyone accept Monero?

>countries where a phone number has an annual fee of hundreds of dollars.

Is this a thing? I've never heard of it. Where?

It's true in the USA if you stick to the big providers... Ring up t-mobile and say 'I'd like a line with 0 minutes and 0 GB of data, just to receive verification texts for Twitter' and they'll probably quote you $200 a year or so...

$120 before tax for T-mobile for 1000 minutes, 1 GB/mo.

Why the arbitrary limitation to the “big providers” - you can get a basic Tello plan with SIM for $5/month prepaid - and they’re a T-mobile MVNO so it’s a T-Mobile number.

Tracphone is the company you want for this sort of thing. A SIM costs $0.99 (requires unlocked phone of course) and you add $15 to the account to get 500 texts. (I think you can do this with cash at a place like Walmart.)

It is expensive if you need to keep the plan around, but Twitter doesn't seem to regularly send SMSes to the phone number, so you probably don't need to pay beyond the first month.

You need a plan to have a number because it's difficult/impossible to get a number allocated to you as an individual. If we assume "hundreds" means >=$200/year, then the maximum monthly payment we can have for that not to be true is $16/mo. The absolute cheapest phone plans I could find in the US that weren't for alarm systems were $15/mo on mvnos like mint. In practice, I suspect few people are paying less than $25-$30 a month, or "hundreds" a year for their numbers.

There are no prepaids? Which country do you have in mind?

Prepaid phone plans in the USA charge you a monthly rate just like subscription plans do. They may also charge you for usage, though that appears to have fallen off compared to the past.

Some years ago I looked into prepaid pricing and determined that it was significantly more expensive than a subscription plan at even my almost-never-use-it levels of phone use. (At that time, pricing was based on (1) a reasonable per-use rate, which would have been very cheap; combined with (2) a high flat fee charged on any day you used any feature of the plan, which already nullified any price advantage; and (3) a requirement to add funding to the plan every month, regardless of whether you had an existing balance.)

Wow, the prepaid plans in your country suck.

How they work here is:

1. You need to top up by €20 at least once a year to keep your account

2. You may sign up to an offer, which will deduct a portion of a top up each month to activate the offer (e.g top up by > €20, the phone company takes €10 for unlimited texts, or €20 for unlimited data).

3. If you don't top up as required by your offer, you fall back to a state as if you had no offer

4. If you have no offer there's fixed fees of like 20c/sms and €0.50/min of calls, €2/day for 100mb of data

We used to have pre-paid plans like that in the US, but they've fallen out of favor in the last 10-15 years. They were complicated to use, and very expensive: many MVNOs had rules such has having at least one top-up a month to keep the line active, and money used to top-up had time limits before they'd expire.

Now pre-paid is often just paying for a month before usage rather than after usage. Even cheaper providers like Mint sign you up for 3 months at once, which can get expensive if all you want it for is just satisfying Twitter.

At some point it just gets ludicrous, though.

Is it reasonable for everybody to go buy "burner" phones to sign up for Twitter?

The truth is, it's stupid for Twitter to require a phone number, and it's especially stupid that they blame the user for using their real number.

In India, its not expensive at all, but every sim card is available only after you provide a copy of your national id card aka Aadhar Card.

But as the OP mentioned, you need to maintain a paid plan and activity on the SIM to keep your number from expiring. It’s neither indefinite nor free.

Yes, I meant that even if somebody who wants to keep the identity unattached to twitter (& thus not risk doxxing after twitter data leak), in India its not possible at all even if they have money to afford.

> but every sim card is available only after you provide a copy of your national id card aka Aadhar Card.

Can you not get an activated SIM off the street?

No, technically every SIM gets activated only when mobile phone provider gets the user's documents copy & a verification call comes from mobile company's service center to an existing number of yours or family (& you verify your documents details). If you don't have a existing number to reach, they make you to bring documents to official store. There is no pre activated SIM cards.

Mostly, like any other country, this happened because they found bad people were using pre activated sim cards for terrorism.

My exiting phone number is now 14 years old, same provider, prepaid. I have been required to submit updated KYC about 4 times in these years.

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