Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by lotsofpulp 1266 days ago
The idea that you can contact a phone number without any idea how much it will cost in 2023 is crazy.

At the least, there should be a list of phone numbers known to not result in surprise charges so you can block all others.
5 comments
toast0 1266 days ago
When I was working in this space, all of my providers gave me a pricing feed which was essentially phone number prefix, price (and some text that my system didn't care about, I don't need a name, just a price, thanks). It looks like twilio doesn't offer that publicly for SMS, but you can see their voice price list by clicking "download voice prices (.csv)" on their voice pricing page [1]. The SMS page has a similar feed, but it only gives you price by carrier name, which isn't very helpful --- you'd need to pay to do a carrier lookup before you could use the price list; these lists don't feel complete either anyway, but it's an idea.

[1] https://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing/us

link
Natsu 1266 days ago
You'd think they'd have an option simply not to let you connect to those toll numbers at all.
link
dima_vm 1266 days ago
They do: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2015/08/introducing-max-price.ht...
link
AdrianEGraphene 1266 days ago
Wow, ok. I've been hit with this issues twice and both times, the Twilio reps failed to let me know about this. I had previously resorted to just turning off any counties. Looks like mu international app users might get functionality back.... if this feature is still live.
link
dhritzkiv 1266 days ago
Thank you. I can't believe I missed this API parameter when I was looking to solve our toll fraud issue a few years ago.
link
francislavoie 1265 days ago
Do you happen to know which MaxPrice number would make sense for simple SMS? Figuring it out a reasonable value to use from Twilio's pricing pages is proving quite tricky, because of the amount of dimensions to their pricing.
link
dima_vm 1264 days ago
No, sorry. Wondering that myself.
link
dima_vm 1266 days ago
You can download phone prefixes with prices from them, and also set max price for an SMS (won't work if they charge just a little amount and you send thousand requests of course).
link
EGreg 1266 days ago
It gets better. An Ethereum address can receive any tokens, including NFTs, and has no power to reject them. A famous celebrity can have a lot of NFT spam publicly visible in their accounts, and people have no idea if they bought them or not!
link
TylerE 1266 days ago
The idea that phone numbers still exist is kinda crazy. It's like paper checks... just let it die.
link