Show HN: I made a super easy way to verify users' mobile numbers using SMS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a super easy way to verify users' mobile numbers using SMS

digitimate.com

26 pointsccheever21 comments

Awesome. The flow is really great and simple. The only problem is that you're giving things for free and losing money. People will not trust your service for something important since you can stop it at anytime (if you start to lose a lot of money).

Hi- thanks! I open sourced the code so that no one is locked into the service. You can run your own instance if you like very easily.

If it becomes very expensive for me, I'll try to just operate it at close to cost. I don't think this is a huge market, and I just made this as a weekend project because I needed something like it and thought others might find it useful.

Also, the site says you get up to 30,000 verifications for free, so that puts some cap on how expensive this could be.

Does this help you trust it?

Yes. I will probably use it for a project I have here when I succeed in developing the moral strength necessary for marketing it (but it is not a big deal anyway, my comment was more general than about my specific case).

Thank you.

Cool. If you do, happy to help you get it set up (though hopefully it should be easy enough that it's trivial to do yourself).

I was really thinking about implementing a small project that uses such software , and your free solution is a huge gift , it's very generous of you to do so , but if you could find anyway to compensate the money you will be losing through this , it would be great .

Thanks!

If there's interest, I'll probably make a way for you to use your own Twilio account and phone number for anyone that wants to do it that way.

For now, I'm just making it free though. I'll be really happy if someone uses it as a part of making something cool or useful.

Thanks Charlie! Lets me check one item off my backlog of things to do. Genuinely super easy to use. Future feature request: Can we get a /status page to check whether the webserver and db are still up?

Good idea. Added an issue to track it here: https://github.com/digitimate/digitimate/issues/4

I got a C# client on there for you to review. (May want a separate repo).

Sweet! Thanks. Just replied on GitHub.

How can you give away 30,000 SMSs when Twilio charges half a cent each?

If it really helps some cool new services get off the ground, I'm happy to spend a little money on it and in the FAQ it says that if you verify more than 30,000 numbers, we'll ask you to help defray the cost. I don't expect lots of people to verify exactly 30,000 numbers.

6c to Australia! That'd be $1800 / 30,000

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Cheever

Nice, I got a text message in under a second to Sydney, Australia.

Cool :thumbsup: I only tested with US phone numbers so good to know.

Watch out though it costs you more for those international texts.

To prevent abuse, how about requiring a mobile number and confirmation code to use the api. I.e. it uses itself to verify people who want to verify other people :-)

That's a cool idea. I'll probably do that if it starts to become expensive for sure.

Charlie Cheever can afford to give away 30k SMS verifications.

Very cool, will be looking to use this

cool. if you do, let me know if it works well for you.

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