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Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
- robojamison 10y agoHow is this any different from Google Voice?
- scrollaway 10y agoLooks like this is "bring your own number". It's neat, but I wouldn't trust this site to stay up under any kind of stress, which means my number would be erratically dead. If the source is available though, this is neat enough I'd consider self-hosting it.
- hme 10y agoIt's hosted on a paid Heroku instance, our own company number is served by this. The server didn't break a sweat with this HN traffic.
- scrollaway 10y agoThat's not reassuring. It's a free service that could shut down at any time. It's lovely, but I would never use it directly for anything serious unless I could pay for it.
- nubrimo 10y agoit's available in more countries than the US
- aatishnn 10y agoSome things that need fixing: - I could just create an account with nothing entered on the password field and could also login to that account that way. - https://thisnumber.rocks/ https://thisnumber.rocks/ is not being pointed to this same app.
- tallanvor 10y agoWhy is there no information on the costs or requirements? It seems the only possible way to find out is to sign up, which requires providing an email address...
- scrollaway 10y agoTry the demo account I created. Username / password = l1647751@mvrht.com / l1647751@mvrht.com.
- saycheese 10y agoHere's a link to the setup tutorial too: https://www.thisnumber.rocks/tutorial https://www.thisnumber.rocks/tutorial
- beejiu 10y agoIf you don't need the opening hour logic, you can already achieve this will Twilio's Twimlets.
- mxuribe 10y agoWow, I've never heard of Twimlets; very cool! Thanks for sharing!
- yogeshgirdhar 10y agoHow is this different from the hundreds of VOIP services out there?
- hme 10y agoYou keep control over your number, which you bought on Twilio.
- saycheese 10y agoYou control the number of Google Voice and it has the same features too and is free. Clearly if you wanted to use Twillio platform with the same number there are things Google Voice could not do, but as is, I don't see the difference. What is the difference?
- hme 10y agoI don't live in the US, so Google Voice is not available, and I don't know much about it. Using Twilio seems right to me, because it's basically a low level phone number provider, you don't feel that locked.
- saycheese 10y agoYes, that's correct, here's Twillio's information on international support: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223183068-Twilio-international-phone-number-availability-and-their-capabilities https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223183068-Twili... And a Google Voice support covering the topic too: https://support.google.com/voice/forum/AAAAjq5-_rMgML2a7pJrjA/?hl=en https://support.google.com/voice/forum/AAAAjq5-_rMgML2a7pJrj...
- jalons 10y agoThis one is new, so they haven't learned all the corner cases that make VoIP more difficult than anticipated.
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- koolba 10y agoIsn't this exactly what Google Voice does?
- darrelld 10y agoYes, it is.
- grigoryvp 10y agoSuch thing can be created in a few lines of JavaScript code via Voximplant BTW, anyone interested in a tutorial? I can create one.
- BoorishBears 10y agoDropbox is just an FTP server. I'm not saying this will be the next Dropbox, but dismissing products so offhandedly because you underestimate the average user's aversion to "writing a few lines of Javascript" is silly.
- finid 10y agoYes, go ahead, write the tut.
- throwaway2016a 10y agoOp got downvoted a lot (and perhaps deserves it because of the tone of his post) but makes a valid point. This is nothing like dropbox. This is barely a hello world app on the Twilio platform. I have little doubt he could write a tutorial to walk people through it in an hour two two. This would be a good analogy if you dropbox was literally just provisioning a user and setting an FTP password. And if it was, Dropbox would hit scaling problems on almost day one. This won't hit scaling problems because it doesn't do anything... Twilio's API has built-in API calls for all this stuff and the webhooks can (and should) be hosted on AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions for pretty much free with automatic scaling.
- hme 10y agoIt's actually a feature. It saved you one day of your life. And if this free service just disappears some day, you are just one day away to build your own. You got your number from Twilio, there is no lock-in.
- throwaway2016a 10y agoPersonally if I built this I would probably open source it. Then anyone can run it. Although I suspect this is just a marketing ploy for http://aworldforus.com/ http://aworldforus.com/ or they built it for their own use and decided to release it.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- napoleond 10y agoThis looks neat! BTW (shameless plug), for anyone using a Twilio number for voice and wishing to easily add SMS functionality, I created https://www.smsinbox.net https://www.smsinbox.net last year.
- dbg31415 10y agoYears ago one of my clients had an internal system like this... it tried numbers in sequence... but the problem was for the person who dialed in this meant very long wait times if the first person or two weren't responsive. Also we hit issues where the message would end up in someone's personal voicemail box. Then we switched to more of a "ring all the lines at once and the first one who picked up got the call" -- much better for the person dialing in... but meant every one of our support people got distracted every time the phone rang... they hated it. Eventually we just went back to something like ZenDesk for customers to write in to create tickets, and then expanded it to something more like what Apple does... where the user creates a request to be called back at a certain time. This is what the client still uses. It's a better system for everyone than trying to sort out incoming calls in real-time.
- degenerate 10y agoBut now it's bad for the customer again. When they need help, they are ready to call and get their problem solved now, not at some point later in the day. If you're Amazon/Apple/eBay and the "call me on my phone" allows 1-5 minute time windows to being called, that makes sense, but if the customer is sitting around for 10+ minutes you've already frustrated them.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWhat is your strategy for when Twilio goes away?
- goshx 10y agoNot OP, but I am honestly curious to know why you think they will go anywhere soon. Could you please elaborate?
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoI don't. But building a business that depends on another like this, you need to have a backup plan, yes?
- throwaway2016a 10y agoI too would like to know what the thought behind this question is. They are a well established company that runs 2FA and awesome phone apis / systems for thousands of startups and large companies in a field that is high barrier of entry (less competition) and predictable profits since they meter their usage. The only thing I can think of is if a competitor enters the space and blows them away. In which case, there is your answer, you go to whomever blew them away. I can't imagine a lawsuits or something like that taking them down at this point. They have been around too long, it would have happened already.
- throwaway2016a 10y agoAdding to my own post (and thinking out-loud)... I can potentially imagine an acquisition and the acquiring company deciding to shut it down. But the chances of that are so remote I'd still feel comfortable putting mission critical systems on it.
- JustSomeNobody 10y agoWhile not exactly the same thing, people didn't think Parse was going to shut down ... until it did.
- onassar 10y agoAwesome well done @hme Big fan of services that plug into your own billing system (rather than acting as a proxy).
- m4tthumphrey 10y agoShameless plug (UK only): https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/call-handling/divert-forward-routing/ https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/call-handling/divert-forwa...
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoI don't understand how you make money, which makes it look like there's going to be hidden costs. If I start at https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/memorable-business-number/choose-your-number/ https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/memorable-business-number/... and choose, for example, a revenue generating number then go to the payment it says I get a free number that diverts to my phone for no up-front cost and zero monthly fee. So how does that work for you? Ah, hang on the slide-away at the side says £10, whilst the "STEP 5" says £0. Looks like there might be an issue with your business logic? [FF51 on Ubuntu.]
- m4tthumphrey 10y agoOn that particular number type the caller pays to call so we take a cut of the call charge, hence revenue generating. Also, only the one and two star numbers are free. Which combo did you select to get the £10 and £0?
- zhte415 10y agoIs this like DNS for a Twilio number? That's what I get. If I misunderstand could you fill out more, as if so this could be useful for contingency planning.
- nickodell 10y agoIt's more like DNS using Twilio. It's analogous to Google Voice.
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoTwilio has something called "Twimlets" that make setting this up very very simple. For voicemail you simply have to create a separate "twimlet" and have the resulting URL attached to the other one you use for the forwarding.
- philips 10y agoYes, we string a couple of Twimlets together to direct people to support or general inquiry phone lines. Works really well. No problems in 3+ years. The menu one in particular: https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/menu https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/menu
- josh_carterPDX 10y agoI love that Twilio rolled Twimlets into the dashboard instead of making it a separate site. Full disclosure: I'm an early (and former) employee @ Twilio
- benwilber0 10y agoyou dont need to say full disclosure... you can just tell people you used to work at twilio.
- scosman 10y agoWe use a twimlet for our business number. It simply plays a recording directing people to our support web page and email (phone support would be too expensive). A surprising number of places need a phone number; for example, Stripe includes it in the charge description.
- scrame 10y agoIsn't this part of what twilio does already?
- AbeEstrada 10y agoOfficial solution https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223179908-Setting-up-call-forwarding https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223179908-Setti...
- Animats 10y agoDoesn't look good. Remember, you're giving this unknown business the power to snoop on your phone calls. Do you want to open that back door? No visible privacy policy. No visible pricing information. Not good. Twilio can do this without any help from these guys.[https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets].
- Falling3 10y agoThat's my first thought. Why not just do it yourself? Especially when twimlets are around.
- ramya_raghu 10y agoI built my Call Forwarding app using Plivo. It was pretty straight forward to use. https://www.plivo.com/docs/getting-started/forward-an-incoming-call/ https://www.plivo.com/docs/getting-started/forward-an-incomi... is their official documentation on Call Forwarding. Also, every user gets a pre-built Call Forwarding which requires you just add the numbers for testing which looks like this - http://callforward.herokuapp.com/forward/?Numbers=NUMBER_1_HERE,NUMBER_2_HERE http://callforward.herokuapp.com/forward/?Numbers=NUMBER_1_H...
- sushid 10y agoMore importantly, why would you want to call your "real" numbers sequentially by default? You might prefer hitting all of them simultaneously, which is also trivial as everyone else here has mentioned. https://www.twilio.com/blog/2009/05/dialing-multiple-numbers-simultaneously-with-twilio.html https://www.twilio.com/blog/2009/05/dialing-multiple-numbers...