Oneway.tel: two-factor auth phone numbers for side-projects and small orgs | Hacker News Reader

Oneway.tel: two-factor auth phone numbers for side-projects and small orgs

oneway.tel

23 pointsstanleydrew19 comments

One of the appeals of this type of service is to create a Google account without providing your cell phone number. A bit of the chicken/egg issue if there isn't a way to make an account without using Google or Facebook. I would sign up in a heartbeat if there was an email/password option instead. Another comment brings up another good point of the type of service the inbound numbers are identified as. Most services that require a phone number to verify the account registration also use services like nuestar to filter out Voip/DiDs and other phone numbers that are not tied to a physical SIM card.

You require a google or fb account to signup, kinda defeats the purpose?

Agreed, this looks awesome but that's a non-starter for me. I'll admit that I hate using OAuth for logins in general and prefer to keep all my accounts separate. However, I'd easily settle for Github/Gitlab for authentication, since I get that managing authentication can be a pain.

Yeah I understand OAuth isn't for everyone, it is mostly just convenient for me and simplifies the authentication process (no distinction for users between signing up and logging in). I can add Github and/or Gitlab pretty easily though. Which one do you need?

Github! Because you don't need a phone number with them.

This is a fair point, although I have many Google Accounts verified with my single personal number and that doesn't seem to be a problem for them.

I don't like handling passwords and it complicates the signup/login process which is why I don't usually implement password auth for small projects, but in this case I should probably consider it.

How would you feel about supporting sign in with Apple and upcoming Passkey support?

Haven't read anything about it but presuming it's well-designed and doesn't require me to store a password that seems like a nice thing to offer.

Tremendous, thanks for considering this for your auth factor bridge.

I made this to solve a problem I have regularly with my side projects, which is that I often need a phone number to sign up for some service (e.g. PayPal) but I've already signed up with my personal number.

Anyway I hope some of you in similar situations might find it useful. Let me know if you have feedback or comments here or via email to hello@oneway.tel

Could you tell us what provider you're using for these phone numbers? Many services won't sent SMS to VOIP numbers due to fraud, fake accounts, etc.

I’ve tried using Twilio in the past to automate 2FA for a shared team account and the number just got rejected everywhere I tried. This would be great if it works but given that defeating this isn’t one of the selling points on the main page I’d guess that it’s not something that has been considered.

Success with 2FA depends on the type of phone number. Right now oneway.tel offers US wireline VoIP numbers (from Twilio), which won't work for verification with some services (although there's no technical reason they can't).

I have one customer using a UK mobile number (also from Twilio) to successfully authenticate with Wise (among other things). If you're interested in testing out a non-US mobile number let me know via email to hello@oneway.tel and we can work something out.

These are Twilio numbers. I have had success with verification using Twilio numbers although sometimes the "Call me instead" option is required. I implemented a simple voicemail inbox for those cases.

Your mileage may vary of course. I'd like to collect a list of services that don't allow verification at all via landline/VoIP and post it.

Hi, I was a charge.co customer a few years back. It was neat, and bummed it's no longer around. For this new service would customers own the phone numbers as long as they're paying for them? Could they be ported to another service?

Yeah I'm a little disappointed about how Charge turned out too. Working with Sprint was tough, I'll just leave it at that.

The question about porting is a good one, and I basically punted on making a decision until I could tell whether anyone was interested in the service. I am of course using Twilio under the hood, so porting out requires using their process, documented here: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223179588-How-d...

It's a little cumbersome but I don't see any reason to prevent port-outs.

What features does this offer in comparison with just signing up for a Twilio number for $1/month? I've always just used their message logs UI to look at inbound messages for 2fac.

I used to do that with Twilio directly too, and just got tired of configuring the same thing multiple times with multiple accounts. I added a simple voicemail inbox and then made a UI to display all the messages and voicemail recordings, and that became oneway.tel.

So oneway.tel is basically just the Twilio messages/calls/recordings log in a more convenient interface, with Google/FB auth (which is convenient for me).

If you're already experienced with Twilio configuration and their console then $5/month may not be worth it.

There is great value in wrapping a generic offering for a specific purpose, I congratulate you! I apologise if it felt like I was being critical.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com