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This concept has been amazing for my family and kids.

Shameless plug: I started my own service without vendor hardware lock in.

https://chatterboxphone.com


Oh nice! I have been working on my own too! (https://havenphone.com). I was planning on the exact same model and pricing as well.

I am curious: have you gone down the tr069 rabbit hole? If not how do you plan to do endpoint management?

Are you using a Fanvil H2W? Too? That was my first phone choice.

I also learned of https://www.beanstalk.club from this thread as well. Looks like there are a few folks trying to do similar services without the proprietary hardware and waitlists.


FYI - your support email at havenphone.com is bouncing back as not found.


I’ll send you a message to your support account :-)


thanks! of course that email was misconfigured for a few hours. fixed now!


No vendor or hardware lock-in is key. Can you give insight into the costs that inform the monthly rate? Emergency services / telephone network?


Sure thing! Behind every "unlimited" plan out there, there is a per minute rate that small carriers like us have to pay in order to get access to the regular phone network and connect to any phone number in the world. On top of that, there's a monthly cost per phone number, per E911 address registration, per voice channel, etc. Then, you have the ever popular "taxes and fees", which can vary based on the user's location and can become complex very quickly. Not to mention FCC registration fees and taxes. Then there's the cost of the server infrastructure to register the phones and keep them online. And finally - STIR/SHAKEN implementation has a cost of registration and verification as well.


Thank you for this little window into what it really takes to make this work.


Check out FusionPBX or FreeSWITCH. Great options, I like them better than anything Asterisk based right now.


This is great, and I can think of several business uses and some personal.

Like this: Could I use this to pull screenshots or PDFs of my grocery receipts from a major grocery chain?


Yes! We're helping a few companies with this right now. This use-case actually surprised me.

I never realized how important it is to track invoices in Europe (where VAT needs to be closely tracked), and a large % of vendors require you to log into their portal to fetch them


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