[subhro]

Yes, get a trunk from someone like BulkVS, SignalWire and run your own freeswitch or asterix. You can set up arbitrary “allowed” lists. Hell you can even get fancy with lookups and decide on the fly to allow a call or not.

There are other comments about providers, but my way is way cheaper and you can run you EPBAX on a pi or even get a pre made VM from Azure, Amazon, etc.

Damn I hate paying rent.

[turnsout]

Whoa, love this. Do you have any recommended resources if I wanted to try this out? Any comments about FreeSWITCH vs Asterisk, or BulkVS vs Signalwire for a simple setup like this?

[subhro]

Freeswitch is more complicated and has a steeper learning curve, but you can pair it with FusionPBX and it will make things a lot more palatable. Asterix is the grand daddy of this stuff. The community is stronger for Asterix. Freeswitch is pretty much infinitely customizable.

SignalWire is the primary sponsor of Freeswitch but is mainly geared towards HUGE installations. BulkVS is cheaper and better in my opinion. You can also look at AnveoDirect, which is more raw than BulkVS, but you can become really really fancy with it. Like, call center fancy.

[mnutt]

I did a writeup of my own experiences using Asterisk for this exact use case: https://github.com/mnutt/rotary

[turnsout]

This is exactly what I was looking for—thanks! So cool that you did this with a rotary phone.

[wizzwizz4]

Asterisk has better voice lines, like if-rotary-phone.wav, tt-somethingwrong.wav, shiny-brass-lamp.wav, you-sound-cute.wav, and tt-monkeysintro.wav.