Cheaply calling your Granny abroad. Build your own tools for dental emergencies. Browsers are the best delivery platform. How far high roaming fees will push you.
TL/DR: I built a browser phone app for cheap international calls. Read on for the backstory.
It’s been a while since I wanted to build a product. Not just anything with which I’m happy once I have a draft online, but rather, something that:
- is useful (first and foremost for me, but also for others)
- is easily useable (decent user experience)
- looks finished
Like anyone, I have tons of small problems (some for which I even built tools for!), so there’s no real shortage of ideas for things to build.
However, taking the time for making it useable (and, then, safe to release) and do some amount of polishing is where I’ve stopped many times before.
Where there is pain…
This time, multiple things conspired to push me over the edge:
Skype is closing soon, and some digital nomad acquaintances started looking for alternatives. Someone joked that a webapp allowing you to do cheap calls would print money, and this made me wonder what would it actually take to do this? Meanwhile, others started wondering how will I call my tax authorities back home? (think IRS for the US, but it seems Kiwis love doing that too). So, mostly as a joke, but also to satisfy my curiosity, I started concretely tinkering with the idea of a Tax Authority directory that lets you directly call from your browser.
Roughly at the same time, I did my bi-yearly call to my Grandma abroad, which I knew was going to cost me a few bucks because of high roaming fees. Wouldn’t it be nice to have my own little app for this, and basically pay API Prices?
The final push came two weeks later: while I was on a road-trip in the US with my partner and my son, I suddenly and urgently required a dentist. It took reaching only two or three answering machines to run into the roaming limit of 20 bucks that I had set for my home mobile provider (and the e-SIM provider I was using offered no voice calls).
At that point I was so annoyed that I wasn’t going to give one more cent to my home operator, and proceeded to monkey-patch my call-the-irs prototype so it would let me call any number.
Fast-forward to today, and I can finally say I shipped a first working product!
Easy landline or mobile calls from your browser, pay-as-you-go!
Any-Call.app is there specifically for the occasional (but possibly urgent) call to a landline number you might need to do when no other option is available. Dental emergencies come to mind, but while traveling you may want to call a camping, national park or some other business that has no online way of being quickly contacted online1. (Or you just want to call someone who does not have WhatsApp).
It’s built with ease and quickness of use in mind:
- no signup
- no app download, 100% in browser and works on Desktop, Laptop and Mobile (iOS and Android!)
- no upfront minimal credit charging
The user flow literally is:
- type in your number
- estimate how much it’ll cost you
- provide your payment info for a $1 hold
- call as much as you like
- get charged a few hours later, after you’re done calling
Obviously you need network coverage: I’ve found this works well at least with the cheap e-sim provider I was using.
… there is a business plan
Well, about that… to quote another acquaintance: “this is low ticket, you’ll need a lot of traffic”. The primary goal was to make something useful: profit was not the first thing I had in mind, but let’s see if the small margin I make will turn into anything. It’s built in the small bets spirit: maintenance costs are pretty low, so this thing can live its own little life while I occasionally promote it.
If you want to give it a try, it’s over here!
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Many US national and state parks have phone numbers you can use if the online reservation tools are frustrating you! ↩︎