A pricing page would be nice. You mention a starting price, but that's not often the whole story.

Thanks for the suggestion, we'll add a pricing page that doesn't require logging in. The "starting price" is just the price of our cheapest numbers (pricing varies by country). We maybe should think of a less scammy-sounding way to describe that.

Probably the way you just described it would work, "pricing varies by country, starting at ___". This is a service I have been looking for, but I don't like the idea that I need to buy into one or another of the internet-money fads. Do you foresee offering this service for regular money? If not, do you know anyone who might?

Anveo sells SMS capable numbers in a variety of countries. You have to pay for a month, but they are cheap. There are other VoIP providers as well. Two things to watch for though, not all sell SMS capable numbers, and some services check that the verification number is an actual mobile number...versus a VoIP number that can do SMS.

At the moment, we only plan to offer Bitcoin and Monero payment. There's a lot of other improvements I'd like to spend time on first before getting into fiat currency payment.

> 🇦🇺🇦🇹🇧🇪🇨🇱🇨🇿🇪🇪🇫🇮🇫🇷🇩🇪🇭🇰​🇭🇺🇮🇪🇮🇱🇱🇹🇳🇱🇳🇴🇵🇱🇸🇪🇨🇭🇬🇧

What does all those letters I see mean? I see only flags of France, Germany and the UK. Maybe it has to do something with fonts installed on my computer.

The Unicode symbols for flags consist of a special set of combining country-code letters that when used in two-character combinations compose into flags. That solution ensures that the Unicode standard doesn't hard-code the existing list of countries and country codes. In addition to future-proofing, that also avoids dealing with disputed regions that not everyone recognizes as countries.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Indicator_Symbol .

I parse those as ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes:

AU AT BE CL CZ EE FI FR DE HK HU IE IL LT NL NO PL SE CH GB

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Chile, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Turns out they're in alpha order by country name, too.

When I imagine, in my head, "hmm, how can I present a string of 20 x 2 chars, what is the best way I can confuse the reader?" this is the exact solution I come up with, also.

Just a heads up that the landing page's dependency on emojis makes it look very confusing on Ubuntu 16.04

http://i.imgur.com/S9zOiDY.png

Thanks for the heads up! We'll find a more widely-compatible way to do the flags than using plain Unicode characters.

Is this the way it should look like? http://chronial.de/misc/screenshots/firefox_2017-02-21_19-11...

Ideally unicode was that way, honestly. I haven't found a way to install these emojis on Linux...

Top Sites to Receive SMS Online Without a Phone

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13631724 (7 days ago)

Why did you decide not to support us #s?

It's on the roadmap, but we need to integrate with another provider to support them. Most major communications services that verify your number don't mind which country it's from, but we realise there are good use cases for having a number from a specific country.

Is there anyway to test one of your numbers to see if where I plan to use them they are accepted, before buying?

No, we don't offer free trials, as they would be abused. However, you can just rent a number and cancel it immediately if it doesn't work for you -- we charge the rental by the minute so you would only spend a very small amount of money in the case that it didn't work for you.

Got it thanks.

Can you elaborate on your technology stack? How do I get the phone numbers you provide for your users?

Sure! At the moment we integrate with the Twilio API for our numbers, although we have a few more providers on the way. We don't offer all countries that Twilio does because we test the numbers out to make sure they work with most services before whitelisting a country to appear on our service. Our software is written in Rust and uses the Iron framework for the webapp. PostgreSQL keeps the records. nginx sits in front.

Probably using a service like Twilio.

What services do these generally work with?

Facebook? Google? Twitter?

And which not?

It depends on the country the number belongs to, and sometimes on the specific number, but we only list countries where we've tested a few numbers from that country and found they work with most services. We can't guarantee anything about which services will or won't accept our numbers, but we only bill by the minute so it's very cheap to try it out and cancel after a minute or two if it doesn't work out.