I don't know about iPhones, but can't you just set your phone to appear as 'unknown caller' (so, no phone number is transmitted)? Or is this not really invisible?
Am I wrong in guessing this is a Twilio-powered service?
If so, this is a brilliant pricing model for adding value on top of someone else's API. One-time App store pricing of $1.99 gets $1.39 to use on purchasing a short-duration Twilio line and then in-app purchases can be used to refill extra numbers/minutes, all presumably with enough margin to make money on top of the basic "reserve and use a Twilio number" functionality.
Just checked and Twilio phone numbers are $1/mo. and 1-2 cents a minute for calls. There's definitely headroom to make money here.
Where did you find the pricing model? I don't see prices anywhere on the page. Do I have to play the video or something? I hate having to search for prices. The act of searching for prices starts a feeling of distrust of the company which builds until I find it.
The only think that might confuse people is if you start to recycle numbers (because you don't want to keep paying for them), and the call gets connected somewhere totally unrelated.
I thought you might be using caller ID, so the number is only relevant to people with a specified phone number. (Similar to how Rebtel works.) But it doesn't seem to be the case here, as I think numbers can be shown publicly.
All phone numbers have some ambient activity -- wrong numbers alone account for at least some randomness, though some obviously have more than others, and even very established carriers sometimes distribute numbers with a "legacy". So it's sort of a known problem.
For Burner, each number goes through a quarantine and is monitored for activity before we use it.
EDIT: Also worth noting that SMS seems to be more popular than voice calls, at least initially. "Wrong number SMS" doesn't seem like an actual problem as of yet.
Only if Burner is handling the outgoing phone calls (to your real phone number) themselves. Seems like you could bridge a phone call to a Twilio phone number to the end user's real phone with the <Dial> element pretty simply: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/dial
I'm hoping they do, but it would actually get tricky.
Law enforcement wants info on a phone number -> it goes to Twilio -> Twilio links this number at that time to Burner -> Burner links this number at that time to a user account. At this point, I'm not sure how they can link it to a real person. I'm guessing the credits are from in-app purchases, which means Burner itself might not have any real personal info on you and the buck then passes to Apple.
That means three different privacy policies involved and most likely a pretty long delay.
What do you mean "block all google-voice numbers"?
As in automatically removing them from posts? That would be very stupid because some people use their Google Voice number exclusively, and it shouldn't be up to them to decide how I should be contacted.
It's very annoying, they do it to combat spammers but as an innocent user I get hit all the time with the phone verification.
Craigslist requires that your number be identified as "Fixed Line" or "Mobile" (not "Non-Fixed VoIP" or "Prepaid Mobile") by their provider, ReduceFraud.com, in order for you to be able to complete phone number verification and post in certain sections on CraigsList.
From my personal experience I think some numbers do get reused. When I first got my Google Voice number I kept getting a bunch of calls asking for some other person, so I guess Google just reused someone else's old number.
Numbers do get reused. I live in Paris and last year a friend freshly arrived from my hometown in Portugal was attributed the cellphone number (major French operator) from a german acquaintance of mine that had moved out of Paris a year before. She still gets text messages in German all the time.
"You can use a Burner for dating, Craigslist, short-term projects, side businesses, bands, and other times when you need to be in touch but want to maintain a little privacy." -- Such as when I want to be a royal pain in the ass towards ex-girlfriends, and people that I generally dislike. How have you planned to reduce angst caused by the misuse of your app?
Running around in public, repeatedly using different payphones is a little different to sitting in your bedroom creating "temporary phone numbers at the touch of a button."
True enough. I can see this becoming something to do at college / teenager parties. Create a temp number and start crank calling. If you had to take an entire group of people out to a payphone to do the same thing, it's a bit of a barrier to doing it.
This explains why they are ex girlfriends! Why on earth would the app get involved in how the app is used, that's th responsibility of the user, just like when you buy a kitchen knife, the designer wasn't giving much consideration to reducing angst caused by its misuse.
Please let's stop with the nanny state nonsense. As others have pointed out its no different to pay phones.
I would think that the majority of the overall usage of kitchen knives would be true to the designer's intention. Given that this app is available on the iPhone App Store, which every immoral spur-of-the-moment teenager has access to, and will likely abuse, it is definitely something that the developers should have considered.
-- "Display a different number to protect yourself or pull a prank on a friend. It’s easy to use and works on any phone!"
Just because we can do things, and others do, means we shouldn't discuss the different use-cases and implications? I gather that most people are here to make a quick buck using their technical prowess, but to look away from possible misuse seems very shortsighted.
Nothing wrong with asking developers to think about what their creations are enabling. Let's not confuse the root cause though. The technology brings our shadow side out into the open. That same shadow side may itself allow for positive changes in society.
I'm thinking Craigslist scams will be one of the major use cases. You've got my cellphone number, I'm legit! Wanna buy a bicycle? Pay no attention to this snipped chain hanging off the handlebars.
This looks like a great concept- but I have to question the one time purchase price.
Right now, Burner is top of mind for me, but I don't have an immediate need to use the app. If it were free, I would gladly download it right now, and simply pay for a number whenever a use case arises.
As it stands now, I probably won't download the app, and when a potential use case does arise, who knows if I'll remember (and be able to download on the fly) this app.
Great concept, and love the rest of the pricing model built on Twilio. I just think the Burner team might be missing out on potential additional distribution.
It's $2.00. I'll probably use it at some near-future unpredictable time. Between now and then I'll probably also spend $50 at Starbucks and $100 at the bar.
Thanks for the feedback. We gave this a lot of thought but ultimately didn't want to create an experience that was a "free" download that required additional in-app payment before it had any utility.
Why do people treat buying an app with the same amount of deliberation as buying a new car? The price is less than a large coffee at Dunkin Donuts.
I don't mean to be picking on you quintendf because I do exactly the same thing and your comment made me realize it. I am going to download the app just because of your arguement - I am going to need it sometime in the next few months and not remember the name.
There must be some cognitive bias about buying an app. I will blow $2 on a Diet Coke when I fill-up with gas with barely a second thought. But ask me to download a $2 app - Whoa! this is going to take some thought, research...
If most apps were $5 and $10 instead of free and $.99, you would probably buy the $5 apps and wish the $10 were $5. For better or worse, people expect mobile apps to be <$1 or free.
Agreed- there definitely seems to be some kind of mental hurdle people have about those $2 purchases. Like you, I'll probably end up purchasing it now that I've thought about it logically and because gregcohn took the time to respond to my post.
That said, my comment was more focused on the business decision of making an app like this paid. If you could effectively A/B test this kind of scenario, I wonder which approach would actually lead to more long term revenue.
Quintendf wasn't necessarily saying that apps shouldn't cost money. He/she was asking why this one, considering the obvious stream of revenue that it will bring? And why even ask why? The bar has already been set for apps to be mostly free or just 99 cents. It's a basic part of human psychology to be affected by an "anchor price", regardless of rationality.
anchor price, i.e. a suggested price, which in this case is the perceived status quo of free or 99 cents. In a famous experiment, students were told to spin a roulette wheel and then make an estimate about some world fact. Even though the roulette wheel obviously* had nothing to do with the question, students who got a higher number from the roulette spin on average made higher estimates.
Initial extreme profitability of platform and its relative openness to developers spurred massive competition. The newness (e.g. PS2 Games on release vs 5 years later) no doubt contributed to a bias towards competition by price instead of differentiation.
Now prices are anchored near $1 for the most part.
I ended up buying the app for this reason. However, in the past few months, I have also been exploring clutter, tooling, and minimizing the things in my space.
I'm moving from the East Coast to the West Coast. I'm planning on taking one car load worth of possessions. The rest, I am giving away or trashing.
In this month-long process, I have discovered that:
(1) It is emotionally draining to sort through my possessions and let them exit my personal space.
(2) Among the most common, recurring pattern of emotion/rationalization is that of fear and "I may need this in the future." Looking at it clearly, though, many of those things I bought in which I "might" need, I have never actually used. They end up being security blankets.
(3) Once it is out, this appears to free up a great deal of mental space. I've been finding things easier to get things done and try new things.
(4) This leads to more deliberation and mindfulness on the new things coming into my space.
(5) Apps are no different. There is a certain ruthlessness in deleting the apps you have purchased and the data it stores after it no longer serves.
So it isn't so much, why would you not buy a $2 app when you are willing to blow $2 on a Diet Coke. It's more that, why wasn't the $2 Diet Coke you are shoving into your body given as much due deliberation?
LOVE this idea. actually thought of something like this a few months back, but never got around to doing anything on this.
you should post what the costs are for numbers etc.
This is a brilliant idea. I had this exact same one myself a few months ago and never moved forward with it because I had no clue how to execute it properly. Without having installed the app, from the way it's described it sounds like Burner nailed it. Well done guys. I really hope this gets ported to Android so I can use it myself.
This was the first idea I came up with when I thought about the Twilio API, so I'm glad someone has done it.
I just projected so far down the line that I would have requests from the FBI every day for who was behind particular phone numbers due to nefarious use of temporary phone numbers.
Awesome idea. You don't seem to be listed in non-US app stores (Canada, in my case). Any plans to be available internationally, or at least in the same countries served by Twilio?
I eventually found it by searching "burner phone". Fyi, your iTunes link on the site is broken for me, giving a generic "can't connect to iTunes Store". Thanks :)
Well if I wasn't in the UK I'd probably use it to save carting the "recruiter" phone around with me as well. Of course, that would probably annoy recruiters but I think I can live with that (I don't mind them calling me in connection to a role I'd asked them about but 2 or 3 years on out of the blue?).
I assume this is incoming only? or can a Burner number be used to make calls and send texts? Either way, I see huge value in something like this (too bad you are iOS only). But the value is even greater if the Burner number can be used for out going communication.
So I create a Burner number and then I can make calls against that number and the recipient would see the Burner number in their Caller ID? Nice... that has huge value! Also open for abuse but anything can be abused.
Really wonderful job on this app. Just tested it out (ios6b4 on a 4s) and all worked really well and very fast. Would love to see some usage data as you grow. Congrats on shipping!
you get one number, good for up to a week or 20 voice minutes / 60 messages, with the initial purchase. after that you can get more burners on a similar basis.
183 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadIf so, this is a brilliant pricing model for adding value on top of someone else's API. One-time App store pricing of $1.99 gets $1.39 to use on purchasing a short-duration Twilio line and then in-app purchases can be used to refill extra numbers/minutes, all presumably with enough margin to make money on top of the basic "reserve and use a Twilio number" functionality.
Just checked and Twilio phone numbers are $1/mo. and 1-2 cents a minute for calls. There's definitely headroom to make money here.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_with_Popplers)
The only think that might confuse people is if you start to recycle numbers (because you don't want to keep paying for them), and the call gets connected somewhere totally unrelated.
I thought you might be using caller ID, so the number is only relevant to people with a specified phone number. (Similar to how Rebtel works.) But it doesn't seem to be the case here, as I think numbers can be shown publicly.
For Burner, each number goes through a quarantine and is monitored for activity before we use it.
EDIT: Also worth noting that SMS seems to be more popular than voice calls, at least initially. "Wrong number SMS" doesn't seem like an actual problem as of yet.
Just thinking about whether law enforcement or the courts can get details.
Law enforcement wants info on a phone number -> it goes to Twilio -> Twilio links this number at that time to Burner -> Burner links this number at that time to a user account. At this point, I'm not sure how they can link it to a real person. I'm guessing the credits are from in-app purchases, which means Burner itself might not have any real personal info on you and the buck then passes to Apple.
That means three different privacy policies involved and most likely a pretty long delay.
As in automatically removing them from posts? That would be very stupid because some people use their Google Voice number exclusively, and it shouldn't be up to them to decide how I should be contacted.
It's very annoying, they do it to combat spammers but as an innocent user I get hit all the time with the phone verification.
Craigslist requires that your number be identified as "Fixed Line" or "Mobile" (not "Non-Fixed VoIP" or "Prepaid Mobile") by their provider, ReduceFraud.com, in order for you to be able to complete phone number verification and post in certain sections on CraigsList.
reducefraud.com
Do they get reused eventually with the hope that the time since burning is long enough for the old usage of the number to have died off?
[edit] Sorry, didn't see PanMan had asked virtually the same question already.
Please let's stop with the nanny state nonsense. As others have pointed out its no different to pay phones.
http://www.spoofcard.com/
Just because we can do things, and others do, means we shouldn't discuss the different use-cases and implications? I gather that most people are here to make a quick buck using their technical prowess, but to look away from possible misuse seems very shortsighted.
More seriously: what's wrong with asking developers to think about what their creations are enabling?
Right now, Burner is top of mind for me, but I don't have an immediate need to use the app. If it were free, I would gladly download it right now, and simply pay for a number whenever a use case arises.
As it stands now, I probably won't download the app, and when a potential use case does arise, who knows if I'll remember (and be able to download on the fly) this app.
Great concept, and love the rest of the pricing model built on Twilio. I just think the Burner team might be missing out on potential additional distribution.
It's $2.00. I'll probably use it at some near-future unpredictable time. Between now and then I'll probably also spend $50 at Starbucks and $100 at the bar.
$2.00 is not a considered purchase.
I don't mean to be picking on you quintendf because I do exactly the same thing and your comment made me realize it. I am going to download the app just because of your arguement - I am going to need it sometime in the next few months and not remember the name.
There must be some cognitive bias about buying an app. I will blow $2 on a Diet Coke when I fill-up with gas with barely a second thought. But ask me to download a $2 app - Whoa! this is going to take some thought, research...
Are we hardwired to not spend when we get nothing (physical) in return?
Do movies "hack" this behavior by handing you a ticket?
Will my 6 and 8 year old daughters not have this behavior "tick?" They already see no problem with asking to spend $50 on a chest of gems.
That said, my comment was more focused on the business decision of making an app like this paid. If you could effectively A/B test this kind of scenario, I wonder which approach would actually lead to more long term revenue.
anchor price, i.e. a suggested price, which in this case is the perceived status quo of free or 99 cents. In a famous experiment, students were told to spin a roulette wheel and then make an estimate about some world fact. Even though the roulette wheel obviously* had nothing to do with the question, students who got a higher number from the roulette spin on average made higher estimates.
Now prices are anchored near $1 for the most part.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
I'm moving from the East Coast to the West Coast. I'm planning on taking one car load worth of possessions. The rest, I am giving away or trashing.
I know someone who has done something similar: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/12/08/acting-dead-trading-up-...
In this month-long process, I have discovered that:
(1) It is emotionally draining to sort through my possessions and let them exit my personal space.
(2) Among the most common, recurring pattern of emotion/rationalization is that of fear and "I may need this in the future." Looking at it clearly, though, many of those things I bought in which I "might" need, I have never actually used. They end up being security blankets.
(3) Once it is out, this appears to free up a great deal of mental space. I've been finding things easier to get things done and try new things.
(4) This leads to more deliberation and mindfulness on the new things coming into my space.
(5) Apps are no different. There is a certain ruthlessness in deleting the apps you have purchased and the data it stores after it no longer serves.
So it isn't so much, why would you not buy a $2 app when you are willing to blow $2 on a Diet Coke. It's more that, why wasn't the $2 Diet Coke you are shoving into your body given as much due deliberation?
I had to do it to be able to post from Twitter to Google+ automatically through SMS (Google+ lacks a proper API).
I just projected so far down the line that I would have requests from the FBI every day for who was behind particular phone numbers due to nefarious use of temporary phone numbers.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/04/03/these-a...
Because I can't really come up with any.
-girl goes out to to pull. Gives her number freely knowing that it's only good for a few days.
- enter online competitions that might be spam. Advertise a job without getting onto a HR spam list
- Sell a used monkey online without fear of monkey spam
- Put up an MVP for a salsa lesson in Denmark. Get a local number using the app you already know about from the monkey business
- Set up sales meeting with your competitors (define licit..)
- Inform on your boss
- Call your uncle in Iran
I'm sure there are lots more. Who doesn't have some temporary/secondary email addresses?