

Show HN: My two-week MVP, Call2Record - _aes
http://calltorecord.com

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senko
Speaking as a technical user, I don't think I'd use your product for recording
my voice. I can do that trivially with a voice recorder utility on any
computer, or even my smartphone, for absolutely free, and probably with higher
quality than a typical phone line can give me.

What I _would_ consider using this is for having a voice contact form. If I
deal with users who might be more accustomed to phoning someone instead of
filling out web forms, I might tell them "you can call this number and give
your suggestions, feeback, etc". Having an option of leaving a greeting
message (and to inform them they're being recorded) would be nice.

If you're a developer, these are trivial to do with Twilio directly, but if
people don't want to waste time reimplementing stuff they can outsource to
you, it could be useful. There probably are other services which do exactly
this, although I'm not aware of their names at the moment, as I hadn't had the
need to use them yet.

~~~
_aes
I agree it's a pretty niche application that most technical users wouldn't
find a use for. Very interesting suggestion about a voice contact form. I
agree it might be really useful for interacting with a less technical user
base.

I'll probably make the service completely free if it doesn't see any uptake.

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h6165
I find your app great. I can imagine numerous users (at least in my country)
who have don't use smart phones, don't know how to use recording functionality
in mobile phones, and have too low bandwidths to upload recordings. For them
and for me, its a simplifier.

p.s: my country = India

~~~
_aes
Thanks! I need to change my account to accept international calls to make sure
that you can use it.

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systemtrigger
I love how low you've made the pricing. You must be in the red after paying
Twilio 1¢/minute inbound, 2¢/SMS and 2¢/minute outbound. Thanks!

iPhone limits the size of voice memos that I can email myself so for long
memos I will use Call2Record.

Beautiful web design. Nice job.

~~~
stanleydrew
Just a note: we (Twilio) charge 2 cents per SMS now.

~~~
systemtrigger
Fixed, thanks.

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jiffyjeff
I launched an almost identical service, <http://savethatcall.com>, in January.
My prices are extremely low (50 cents + 5 cents per minute), but it's hard to
compete with free! Good luck.

~~~
aagha
Have you made any money off the service?

How long did it take you to build it? What tech did you use?

~~~
jiffyjeff
My margins are low and I've just started gaining traffic, so I haven't made a
lot of money. However, I launched the service with a profit motive, so payment
integration and realistic pricing were baked in from the start.

I built the site in about 80 hours over 3 or 4 weeks. It was a nice
distraction from my master's thesis... Which actually got finished about the
same time as the site went live. :)

I used Google App Engine and Twilio, but I also built an audio processing
module that runs as a daemon on a Dreamhost server. (The latter was a
workaround to GAE's limitations on long-running processes and insertions into
the app engine datastore)

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_aes
hi HN! I put this together to toy around with some new technologies that I
hadn't played with before.

It's a service for recording audio directly to 'the cloud' with any mobile
phone.

~~~
aaronrc
Very nice. Now if you could email transcriptions of the recordings and use
voice recognition to identify the call participants you'd be onto a winner :).

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aagha
Same questions as those to @jiffyjeff:

Have you made any money off the service?

How long did it take you to build it? What tech did you use?

~~~
_aes
1\. I launched it this morning, so no, I haven't made any money off of it yet.

2\. I worked on it part-time for 2 weeks. I'd say it was about 4-5 full days
to put together but a lot of that time was spent learning new
technologies/APIs I hadn't used before.

The tech used to build it are on the FAQ page: Tornado Redis Twilio Google URL
Shortener ReCAPTCHA Mako Templates jQuery SimpleModal IcoJoy WinningTheme

~~~
agranig
I've launched <http://fonoso.com/> a couple of weeks ago, which takes your
idea a step further and records full phone calls and could be used for podcast
recordings over the phone, or any other use case where you want to archive
and/or share a phone conversation.

I didn't put any time or efforts into polishing or marketing it, so if you (or
anyone else) wants to team up, contact me at agranig@fonoso.com. Instead of
twilio or something similar, I use my own SIP trunks to carriers, so for
inbound calls, no fees are charged. It's easier to offer something for free
with this approach :)

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rexreed
I think if you had transcription included, this would be a more compelling
offering (for me, at least -- sample size of one).

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stevenp
The domain name is really impressive. Did you have to buy it on the domain
market, or was it available?

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techscruggs
What is the benefit of using this service over jott.com?

~~~
_aes
This was just a quick side project, so I didn't research too heavily any
alternatives. I've never seen Jott before, but from a cursory glance the
differences are:

Jott has a monthly fee whereas Call2Record is pay as you go.

Jott is probably much more expensive unless you record a lot of audio
($4/month and $12/month compared to $1/hour)

Jott limits you to recording only up to 30 seconds of audio at a time whereas
Call2Record will allow you to record for an unlimited amount of time.

Jott seems to have a bunch of other extra services and features that are built
around and compliment their product.

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rokhayakebe
Call to tweet your audio message, "Hello, I am winning".

