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Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

phonejanitor.com

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Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#31

Post by madcaptenor »

mherdeg wrote: post #2

This sounds crazy, but I'd have a small worry that giving out your CEO's personal phone number exposes potential attacks against other services that use the phone number as a token. Like: (1) Do you have a store-loyalty program at CVS? Can I use your number when I buy stuff and get your coupons? (2) Can I re-set your Amazon.com password using live chat with customer support by convincing them that I know your name an…

(4) Reordering prescriptions would be useless unless you could pick up the prescription. The security apparatus for this seems to be a little more robust - when I pick up a prescription for my wife I'm usually asked for her birthday and sometimes her street address. Not that that's good security, but there are less people who know those than who know her phone number.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#34

Post by aresant »

I think it's a stroke of genius to launch something so aesthetically terrible on HN / PH (aka the early adopter crowd).

For a group of people that see a dozen bootstrap / sandwhich vid style launches a week this stands out, and got me to read 3 paragraphs of ad-copy.

Other notable examples of this launch strategy, intentional or not, in recent memory were Pud launching DistroKid (1) and the team behind Magic (2)

I think in all of these cases the simple, functional approach serves in bringing us closer to the product vs. focusing on the pitch.

(1) https://web.archive.org/web/20130717051607/http://distrokid....

(2) https://getmagicnow.com/

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#35

Post by slg »

TodPunk wrote: post #18
slg wrote: post #11

Do other people evaluate the potential lock-in before signing up for something like this? This service seems great as long as you continue to use it. My fear is that I sign up, port my number, give it out to everyone like the site suggests, and love the service only for this startup to disappear in X years. The phone number used is basically poisoned and I would either subject myself to unwanted calls after porting i…

That's a fair reluctance and I can't take it away because at the end of the day you'll just have that lock-in with anyone. Such is the nature of telco lines. I have the same problem (having carried my home phone line through multiple stacks). What I can say is that I can cover costs out of pocket every month indefinitely (because each user covers their telco costs of that line, I'm just covering infrastructure) and m…

I'm not sure you can compare your lock-in to the telcos. The telcos are for the most part commoditized. I use my phone the same way whether my phone is on Verizon or AT&T. However, you are not exactly offering a commoditized service and I would venture a guess that you don't want to considering your pricing compared to your competitors. You are asking that we make a fundamental change to how we use our phone. Instead of filtering out spam by protecting our number, we take an active hand in managing the spam after the fact. Once we stop protecting our phone number, the toothpaste is already out of the tube.

Also self sufficiency and independence are great for a startup, but that doesn't guarantee that your company will continue to exist. Are you setting this up as your main source of income? Does it pay your bills? Will you get bored of it in 6 months? These are all questions that are going through my mind. Your FAQ doesn't answer them. Your terms of service don't address them and literally guarantee nothing: "We do not guarantee any level of service at the time of this writing. This will change when we have a significant track record with which to stand claims against. In practice we meet high standards, but will not be held to those standards." That makes me very hesitant to not only pay you $15 per month but more crucially entrust you with one of the most important ways people contact me.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#36

Post by traverseda »

TodPunk wrote: post #18
slg wrote: post #11

Do other people evaluate the potential lock-in before signing up for something like this? This service seems great as long as you continue to use it. My fear is that I sign up, port my number, give it out to everyone like the site suggests, and love the service only for this startup to disappear in X years. The phone number used is basically poisoned and I would either subject myself to unwanted calls after porting i…

That's a fair reluctance and I can't take it away because at the end of the day you'll just have that lock-in with anyone. Such is the nature of telco lines. I have the same problem (having carried my home phone line through multiple stacks). What I can say is that I can cover costs out of pocket every month indefinitely (because each user covers their telco costs of that line, I'm just covering infrastructure) and m…

This is based on twilio?

Any thoughts on going open source?

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#37

Post by eevilspock »

From the FAQ:

Why isn't it free? So many things are free!

This is a question we're surprised to get as often as we do. The short answer is we want to run an actual stable business so people know we're profitable and can meet their needs. We don't think someone's phone number is something we would trust to anyone but a business that will be there tomorrow. We also think it's a better relationship if we're trying to sell you a service instead of provide a service to you and sell YOU as the product to advertisers. Not everyone agrees, and that's ok, but it's worked well for us throughout our careers.

We need more of this. Death to Ads!

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#38

Post by TodPunk »

Animats wrote: post #25

Hmm. Good idea, but how solid is the implementation? - Does the voice data pass through Phone Janitor, or is this strictly at the SS7 control level? - Who's listening in? How do we know? - What's the service level guarantee? - Do you have telco levels of redundancy, or is this some 1U server running Asterisk? - Will this reduce voice quality to low-end VoIP levels? How much latency do you add? How much compression?

Excellent questions, I'll field them as best I can, if there's clarification needed just ask.

- Voice data passes through the POTS lines to our VoIP cluster, eventually getting routed to another call channel or to a recording. Freeswitch is the node of choice here, though we're doing rather simple things with it so eventually we'll probably replace this with something more homegrown. Every vendor along those legs can listen in, just like normal POTS lines. Until people get off the POTS system, this is just going to be reality. Plans and plumbing are in place when viable to make this a strictly end-to-end pass-through fully encrypted service if you're not going over POTS. VoIP is pretty awesome stuff.

- Any vendor servicing the lines can listen in. Unless the NSA has stopped, they're definitely processing some of it. If this is a concern, you really just don't want a phone number at all. I'd love to offer better privacy there, but it isn't in anyone's hands but users' really.

- No SLA for the consumer product yet. We have a track record of no downtime outside our maintenance, but we've only been doing this for a few months so that's easy. That said, everything's modular and I can replace any given piece with a new virtual server in under 10 minutes from start to finish.

- Redundancy in the web portion is there, redundancy in the database is there, redundancy in the VoIP level is sort of there, but if any node along your call chain goes down you're going to lose that call and have to start it again. This is yet another failing of voice communications in general, and not something we can do anything about.

- POTS quality is the best we (or anyone) can do. No compression, just straight uLaw without processing so it's as clear as can be expected from a phone. You can actually see this phenomenon displayed from any cell phone currenty. Call another cell on your same network, you get pretty good quality comparatively. Call another cell on another network and depending on peering you could degrade quite a bit. Call a line connected to any copper telco and you're back at the lowest common denominator. Someday if we can get people off telephone numbers (a haughty goal, unfortunately) we can do quality limited only by your hardware on each end.

Let me know if you have more.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#39

Post by tghw »

Why this over Twilio? As far as I can tell, this does what Twilio does, but they're much bigger and more established.

With my setup, inbound business calls get routed to the right person during the day, an automated message if we can't pick up at the moment, and a different message outside of business hours. Outbound calls from our personal numbers get forwarded through the business number our numbers aren't exposed.

It all takes less than 70 lines of Python/Flask.

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