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Comment by bevenky | Hacker News Reader

Well, Phone numbers have a carrier cost. Hence we have tried to make this win-win. We give you the credits which allows you to build most of the needed apps on the cloud.

For the Phone numbers, You can still bring your own phone numbers from free services like ipkall.com and virtualphoneline.com

There are a bunch of more services like these if you google around. :)

Plivo will work with any of these around the globe.

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it's misleading to offer this free credit but have such a huge exclusion on what you can do with it.. Twilio used to have a $20 credit for all new accounts without restrictions, but now that the product matured, it's no more. if you expect people to start building things on your platform and show them off, give them real credit without the *fine print.

You can still use all our apis and xml and build your apps. Like I mentioned earlier, you can still use any of the free DID services and those will work with us.

Except you can't call out or use SMS - there aren't any free services that provide those - which constrains the apps you can build. I have to agree that this announcement is a little underwhelming especially compared to what Twilio used to offer.

Plivo Endpoints works just as great as real numbers. So, you can just build your app using endpoints and use real numbers when you are good to go.

How does Google give out Google Voice phone numbers for free? Are they accepting a loss every time someone registers a new number?

yes, they're losing money on each one

The number itself probably isn't costing them much compared to the per-minute costs of outgoing calls. In the US, once you become a CLEC (basically a non-incumbent telco - Google isn't a CLEC but they buy from them) you can get blocks of phone numbers assigned to you and pay no recurring per-number costs. In fact, you can even charge the caller a small interconnection fee and make a tiny amount of money per call (so tiny that the caller's telco generally eats the cost). This is how services like IPKall and Callcentric (both are CLECs) can offer free phone numbers, and why I suspect Google pays very little per phone number. The equipment you need to be a CLEC is quite expensive though so consequentially IPKall and Callcentric only offer free numbers in a few area codes.

Thanks for this comment. Where can one get blocks of fax numbers. You mentioned CLEC's get block of phone numbers, is there a similar system for allocating blocks of fax numbers. For instance HelloFax usually assign Fax numbers to customers based on area code. Where do they get the fax numbers from?

Many thanks.

Same way - fax numbers are no different from regular phone numbers in the PSTN. (That said, once VoIP enters the equation, you want to use a fax-friendly codec like T.38.) HelloFax is surely not their own CLEC so they're buying phone numbers (with a monthly cost) from one or more CLECs or CLEC resellers. If you know a HelloFax phone number you can look up who the CLEC is using this form:

http://www.alcazarnetworks.com/data_services_lnp_lrn.php

Thanks for the info :)

@agwa, many thanks for the response.

One of the largest benefits for us was the ability to rent numbers through the API. Since developer accounts can't rent real numbers will you be renting out some sort of internal numbers? Not allowing any numbers to be rented seems like an oversight since I'd imagine a lot of apps use (and want to test) this type of functionality.

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