[finniananderson]

Here's the full link: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/onetime-codes-share-your-2...

I'm thinking about building a service which is capable of receiving your 2FA SMS texts from third parties, and forwarding them to you via email.

We'd do this by registering numbers on your behalf, which you'd then use when signing up for the third-party (or setting up 2FA later).

This has a number of advantages:

    SMS can be unreliable and/or slow
    your phone might not be nearby, charged, or have signal
    you could share the codes with other trusted contacts (via email, or have their own accounts to view online)
    can use auto-generated numbers to reduce risk (multiple numbers, multiple services)
    "new phone who dis?" no probs, your number isn't bound to any of those services any more

There would be an option to forward directly via email and/or to view the latest code(s) on the site.

I can see this being especially useful for SMEs where a lot of 'personal' SaaS plans are being used—where there's often only a single root user which multiple people access—or individuals who dislike being bound to a phone number.

I will never have enough information to access their account for the 3rd party service, and I'll only be processing the codes. Privacy & security is my primary concern with this, I am not interested in holding the keys to anyone's castles, so I will be operating on a minimum trust basis.

Really keen to get some thoughts on this project. If I go ahead with it, I'm intending to build it as an Open Startup and share progress in public.

I've got a landing page here for those who wish to register their interest: https://onetime.codes/

I've also got a bare-bones post on ProductHunt if that's more your jam: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/onetime-codes

[throw322342]

This is an interesting idea. I looked into this before when I was traveling internationally, but I ran into issues when trying to set it up with services like Twilio.

1. Many companies send from SHORT code numbers, and not all VOIP providers can accept them.

2. Many companies will look up the number type and only send to cellphone numbers.

3. If you use a SIM modem, some phone companies will check the IMEI and terminate your contract if it's not in a cellphone.

[finniananderson]

Thanks for the info! Super useful. I came across this Twilio support article:

https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223181668-Can-T...

Looks like you need to get the feature enabled, so you can receive SMS from shortcodes. You also need a number in the same country as the shortcode, so users of the service would need to indicate which country the number is for. This would most likely be fine, as I think most people only use 1 number in 1 country anyway.

Hopefully this would solve (1)

Twilio allows you to register mobile numbers, so I think (2) would be ok.

3. I'm not intending to use any hardware, so I think I could disregard this limitation, although it's useful to know anyway!