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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

Do other people evaluate the potential lock-in before signing up for something like this? This service seems great as long as you continue to use it. My fear is that I sign up, port my number, give it out to everyone like the site suggests, and love the service only for this startup to disappear in X years. The phone number used is basically poisoned and I would either subject myself to unwanted calls after porting it elsewhere or be forced to get a new number. That always is the problem with these "run your life through us" startups, what do I do if you fail?

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That's a fair reluctance and I can't take it away because at the end of the day you'll just have that lock-in with anyone. Such is the nature of telco lines. I have the same problem (having carried my home phone line through multiple stacks).

What I can say is that I can cover costs out of pocket every month indefinitely (because each user covers their telco costs of that line, I'm just covering infrastructure) and my hosting fees are easy to cover even if we have no users.

We're probably not a typical startup in that sense. We have sustainability and independence in mind. At this point the only thing investors could offer us is the ability to grow faster. An important thing, but I like giving stability its own rights, too.

I'm not sure you can compare your lock-in to the telcos. The telcos are for the most part commoditized. I use my phone the same way whether my phone is on Verizon or AT&T. However, you are not exactly offering a commoditized service and I would venture a guess that you don't want to considering your pricing compared to your competitors. You are asking that we make a fundamental change to how we use our phone. Instead of filtering out spam by protecting our number, we take an active hand in managing the spam after the fact. Once we stop protecting our phone number, the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

Also self sufficiency and independence are great for a startup, but that doesn't guarantee that your company will continue to exist. Are you setting this up as your main source of income? Does it pay your bills? Will you get bored of it in 6 months? These are all questions that are going through my mind. Your FAQ doesn't answer them. Your terms of service don't address them and literally guarantee nothing: "We do not guarantee any level of service at the time of this writing. This will change when we have a significant track record with which to stand claims against. In practice we meet high standards, but will not be held to those standards." That makes me very hesitant to not only pay you $15 per month but more crucially entrust you with one of the most important ways people contact me.

You have a good point, however, I think Google Voice is already quite good at doing quite similar kind of filtering that the site talks about; as such, I don't even see what kind of value this service is supposed to provide, especially at 15$/mo.

In the absence of Google Voice, this service might be interesting; however, otherwise, why would I pay 15*12 = 180 USD/year for something that I can already get for free?

FWIW, It's likely that Google Voice will be rolled into the back end of a larger but not free service sometime in the near future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/07/0...

Google Fi looks interesting but it appears it will work via your cell phone rather than PC and/or land line (via, for example, Obihai's Obi200 and ObiTalk ... very highly recommended for GV as it is now). And there's Google Fi's price of $30 per month.

Paragraphs 2 and 3 changed my mind from "No way. Never." to "I'm seriously considering this."

This is based on twilio?

Any thoughts on going open source?

It is not based on Twilio, they're quite expensive, it's built on Freeswitch and normal fully open SIP/RTP protocols and what we're doing isn't exactly complex yet. I don't have a whole lot of care about going open source or not but as far as our interface you can view source at https://phonejanitor.com/app/ and you might be pleased for the moment.

> It is not based on Twilio, they're quite expensive, it's built on Freeswitch ... I don't have a whole lot of care about open source

Please pardon me for saying so, but it seems like you do care about open source, or at least leveraging it to save your business money.

Oh, sorry, I poorly worded that then (and have edited it to reflect as such to prevent further confusion, but your quote stands as good reference).

You are correct that I do care about open source. I don't have much of a care about going open source for our stuff. We make our money on service, not software, but I can see the appeal. Essentially I'm just "meh" about doing it myself here.

It should be noted I love the freeswitch folks and while I'm not involved in writing the C (that takes me back), I hang out in the IRC channel and help there when able. I've looked at the code (it's hard to use binaries with FS), but never had to submit a patch as of yet. They're rock solid and deserve every support contract the get!

Go ClueCon!

Looks like you're using Flowroute as backend service? At least that's where the number of the CEO is located.

That is our current primary for the numbers I use, yes.

I did a version of this a couple years back: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2013/03/building-beyond-google-v...

It's rough but worked reliably.

This is a good question, but there so many ways you could build this yourself if you needed to[1], that I think if you relied on this, it would be inconvenient, but not devastating to rebuild if it disappeared, so long as you can port out the number.

[1] asterisk/freeswitch, cloudy telco api, custom software with myriad options for receiving and placing calls.

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