
Show HN: Pay-per-minute video/audio calls with WebRTC - danieka
https://eagledial.com/
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nickphx
I was interested in your service and decided to create an account. I stopped
when I read your "Terms of Service" and noticed this provision:

4\. EXCLUSIVE USE OF FLIFFR 4.1 For clients acquired through EagleDial,
Provider agrees to exclusively use EagleDial and the Platform for live
services. When providing live services, Provider agrees to solely use
EagleDial. Provider may not use EagleDial with the objective of recruiting new
clients for physical or telephone meetings.

Who/What is 'FLIFFR'? Why do I need to use your services exclusively? :|

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nickphx
There's a typo on the buyer facing signup form: 'Agree to the Terms of
Servie'.

Are there any plans to 'whitelabel' or offer a method of integration aside
from requiring buyer to visit your site?

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danieka
Yes, actually that's something we are working on, we've nothing the web page
yet since the offering isn't set in stone. But anyone interested in a
whitelabel can contact me at danielk@eagledial.com

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martimarkov
I’m not 100% sure but do you have to support the connection? If the call goes
from one peer to the other and never touches your server why is there a fee
per minute?

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Sidnicious
It sounds like the _recipient_ charges callers per minute, and the service
takes a 20% commission.

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danieka
Yes, that's right.

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UncleEntity
So 20% commission to basically provide billing?

The company I work for charges a 6% "service fee" to run credit cards for me
and that's at the high end of reasonable. Though they also will cancel your
contract if you use something like square but I think that's mostly for the
customers' benefit so they don't have to worry about dodgy charges and not
because they really want the 6%.

All in all they usually get a lot more than 20% of my gross income (unless I
have a _really_ good day) but they provide almost everything I need to do my
job.

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danieka
It all depends on what you're comparing against. For you I can imagine that
we'd be a bad fit. We're actually going after those that now operate premium-
rate numbers. They usually pay a lot more than 20% to their providers (it's
difficult to say exactly since they have very complex pricing schemes).

You're business has to be centered around charging for calls in order for
EagleDial to make sense. But for those use cases we believe we provide a lot
of value.

edit: I'd be happy to hear more about what you do, and how we can improve
EagleDial. Please send me an email on danielk@eagledial.com if you're
interested in talking more.

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akor
FWIW I'd love to see the UI from the buyer (callers) side even if it's just
screenshots.

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LaundroMat
+1. I immediately wonder what the experience is like for my customers. Do they
have to enter credit card data before they can call me? That sounds like a
hurdle I don't always want to put in front of them.

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danieka
Thank you for the feedback. Right now they have to enter credit card details
before calling.

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caio1982
Every time?

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danieka
Customers have the option of saving their credit card details.

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vkdelta
what is the business model here? Sorry, I am confused here and website is not
explaining it correctly.

I dont see what kind of "premium numbers" are available. Why would someone pay
to talk to me?

would the caller have to register and provide CC number?

Is this call-back model which was used few years back on some website where
some voice companies would offer call-back option from website (I think it
used java that time) and it would cost per minute.

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sccxy
Webcam/Phone sex?

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ineedasername
What are the business cases for needing this sort of service, i.e., who are
your customers likely to be? Who are you selling to that need t to charge
their customers for calling them?

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danieka
Our goal is to replace the premium-rate phone number. So tech support,
therapists, coaches, astrology and tarot stuff etc.

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danieka
Hi, co-founder of EagleDial here. This is the first version of our MVP, so if
you have any feedback we’d really appreciate it.

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chrismorgan
I can enter “pricing” and “contact” and get to at least the next step. I
haven’t tried _actually_ registering them. You should probably ban such
things, maybe some others you’d like to reserve too.

I haven’t tried circumventing the client-side restrictions on which characters
are allowed at all, but the content shown at pages like
[https://eagledial.com/robots.txt](https://eagledial.com/robots.txt) makes me
wonder. I don’t imagine it lets me put just _anything_ into the page, so it’s
_probably_ not an attack vector (e.g. being able to register .well-known/acme-
challenge things and get a TLS certificate for the domain, or convincing
Google that you own the site via a site verification page at /google*.html),
but something to think about and be careful of.

All of your “Follow Us” links have an empty href.

Angular favicon.ico.

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danieka
Yes, that's good feedback, thank you. As you noted we don't ban any names. It
sounds like a good idea to block "special names".

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detaro
[https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-
usernames](https://github.com/shouldbee/reserved-usernames) is a list that
could be a good starting point

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chrisweekly
Interesting resource. I was surprised to see "m" as the only single-letter
reserved name. Would've guessed at least "v" as well.

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BatFastard
Why 'm' and 'v' ?

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bdcravens
For services that put the username as a sub domain

m.example.com looks like a mobile URL for main site

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caio1982
Interesting business idea, I would like to give it a try but I honestly was
expecting screenshots or some short gif/video on how it works (instead of the
pink icons with their descriptions). Also, I assume it could be useful for
consultants and such but maybe you could actually suggest some use cases so
people realize quicker why/how it could benefit them business-wise. I found
the concept interesting because I know the tech but my friends and relatives
would not understand the lingo at a first glance.

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danieka
Thanks for the feedback, you make good points. We'll make sure to incorporate
it in our next version.

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ytNumbers
Congratulations, it looks like you've built something really awesome! Going
with WebRTC and peer-to-peer should save you a ton of money. Since your
service works 24/7, your service seems a lot better than Clarity.fm, and your
revenue cut is quite reasonable. I hate to nitpick, but you've got a typo on
your home page at "receive you earnings". Best of luck!... It looks like
you're going to be a big success.

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danieka
Thanks for your kind words, and for the feedback :)

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Shoothe
It says the calls are end to end encrypted but I thought WebRTC do not have
E2E encryption. I would gladly see some technical details there.

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danieka
We’ll do a write-up on the website in the future. In short the calls are
encrypted between browsers. We do not have a PKI so we can not client-side
check for MITM attacks, but of course we authenticate clients server-side. So,
calls are encrypted end-to-end but also places faith in that our
infrastructure is not compromised.

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Shoothe
I'm mostly interested in whether it's only signaling that's E2E encrypted or
audio/video peer to peer streams between the browsers.

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twiss
Cool! Small nitpicks: the link that's shown to you after you create a link
doesn't work; it refers to eaglelink.com instead of eagledial.com. Also,
perhaps you could make the error messages (e.g. "That link is already
registered") red? I didn't notice them at first.

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danieka
Thank you for the feedback :)

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ratata
Amazing idea. On Chrome Android the extended virtual keyboard seems to mess up
the layout. You can test this in development in chrome desktop in the dev
console's mobile view.

Also, clicking 'next step' doesn't seem to work for me. Good luck!

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danieka
Thanks, I'll take a look at it!

Edit: Next step works now

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samsonradu
Is WebRTC usable in iOS Safari with 2-way audio? Both playing and recording
caused certain distortions, probably related to the audio sample rate.

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nasso
The linked page (the lander) is kind of a mess on mobile, overlapping text and
general chaos.

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Kerrick
“All Rights Reselved” in the footer.

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danieka
Thanks :)

