
Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio - hme
https://www.thisnumber.rocks/
======
Animats
Doesn'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)].

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ramya_raghu
I built my Call Forwarding app using Plivo. It was pretty straight forward to
use. [https://www.plivo.com/docs/getting-started/forward-an-
incomi...](https://www.plivo.com/docs/getting-started/forward-an-incoming-
call/) 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_H...](http://callforward.herokuapp.com/forward/?Numbers=NUMBER_1_HERE,NUMBER_2_HERE)

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tallanvor
Why 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...

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scrollaway
Try the demo account I created. Username / password = l1647751@mvrht.com /
l1647751@mvrht.com.

~~~
saycheese
Here's a link to the setup tutorial too:

[https://www.thisnumber.rocks/tutorial](https://www.thisnumber.rocks/tutorial)

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aatishnn
Some 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.

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cryptarch
That link you posted gives me a cert error.

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saycheese
Confirmed; source of the error appears to be the domain for the cert and the
one using it are not the same domain.

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AbeEstrada
Official solution [https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-
us/articles/223179908-Setti...](https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-
us/articles/223179908-Setting-up-call-forwarding)

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beejiu
If you don't need the opening hour logic, you can already achieve this will
Twilio's Twimlets.

~~~
mxuribe
Wow, I've never heard of Twimlets; very cool! Thanks for sharing!

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josh_carterPDX
Twilio 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.

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philips
Yes, 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
I 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

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benwilber0
you dont need to say full disclosure...

you can just tell people you used to work at twilio.

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dbg31415
Years 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
But 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.

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koolba
Isn't this exactly what Google Voice does?

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darrelld
Yes, it is.

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zhte415
Is 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.

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nickodell
It's more like DNS using Twilio. It's analogous to Google Voice.

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robojamison
How is this any different from Google Voice?

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scrollaway
Looks 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
It'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
That'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.

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napoleond
This 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.

~~~
azonliner
That's something I've been looking for, however $75 a month? Ouch!!

~~~
napoleond
It's largely aimed at software companies using Twilio in their own offerings--
I hadn't given much thought to personal use before. What would you consider a
fair price?

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m4tthumphrey
Shameless plug (UK only): [https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/call-
handling/divert-forwa...](https://www.windsor-telecom.co.uk/call-
handling/divert-forward-routing/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I 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/...](https://www.windsor-
telecom.co.uk/memorable-business-number/choose-your-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.]

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m4tthumphrey
On 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?

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yogeshgirdhar
How is this different from the hundreds of VOIP services out there?

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jalons
This one is new, so they haven't learned all the corner cases that make VoIP
more difficult than anticipated.

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saycheese
What based on the use case provided [1] would the the number one most likely
edge-case and what is the most common solution to it?

Making a claim without constructive supporting points is usually not useful
and worst appears you may know nothing other than how to cause problems
seeding doubt.

[1] Use-Case: Create a virtual number on Twilio and whenever someone calls, a
list of real numbers will be tried sequentially. You can set up opening hours.
If nobody answers, a voicemail is recorded and sent to you by email.

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JustSomeNobody
What is your strategy for when Twilio goes away?

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throwaway2016a
I 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
Adding 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.

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onassar
Awesome well done @hme Big fan of services that plug into your own billing
system (rather than acting as a proxy).

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scrame
Isn't this part of what twilio does already?

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grigoryvp
Such thing can be created in a few lines of JavaScript code via Voximplant

BTW, anyone interested in a tutorial? I can create one.

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throwaway2016a
Op 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.

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hme
It'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
Personally 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.

