

Show HN: I made a super easy way to verify users' mobile numbers using SMS - ccheever
http://digitimate.com/

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fiatjaf
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).

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ccheever
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?

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fiatjaf
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.

~~~
ccheever
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).

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kiloreux
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 .

~~~
ccheever
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.

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albertwang
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?

~~~
ccheever
Good idea. Added an issue to track it here:
[https://github.com/digitimate/digitimate/issues/4](https://github.com/digitimate/digitimate/issues/4)

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jacob9706
I got a C# client on there for you to review. (May want a separate repo).

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ccheever
Sweet! Thanks. Just replied on GitHub.

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

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ccheever
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.

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

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

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bbcbasic
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 :-)

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

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

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chayesfss
Very cool, will be looking to use this

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

