Burner
p/burner
Disposable Phone numbers
Will Carter
Firewall — Extreme Robocall Blocker
4
Firewall is the only service that completely eliminates 100% of unwanted phone calls. Forward your calls to us and we’ll screen them, letting the people you want to ring your phone through and the rest to a best-in-class voicemail service.
Replies
Brad Barrish
Been using the app since early alpha builds. It's been awesome seeing this app / service get better and better. I've come to depend on it in a big way and always know that if my phone rings, it's not going to be a robo-dial or spammer. Thank you for building this and getting it into the world.
Will Carter
Hey, co-maker here. We’ve spent 6 years building up expertise in the phone comms space with our flagship product Burner, and today we’re releasing our first second product, Firewall. This product was built with love, but also hate: a hatred of disruptive and annoying phone calls! There are a lot of good apps there for blocking calls (nomorobo, robokiller, etc.) but they all work on the same basic blacklist model: try and identify bad numbers and block them from getting through. The problem with this is that scammers are usually a few steps ahead of the game and the blacklist model is really just whack-a-mole ad-infinitum. Furthermore, there are a lot of calls we get that we don’t want but aren’t illegal. Gyms, car salesmen, politicians… whatever random people happen to have a phone number...can all ring us at any point of any day too, and those calls are just as disruptive. Firewall works in the opposite way. By forwarding *all* calls to our system, we can allow through (to VoIP / in-app calling) only the people you’ve selected explicitly to have “phone privileges” to be able to ring your phone. This can be everyone you know (all of your contacts), or a tailored list that you can easily add new callers to. Everyone else either gets blocked completely (known robocallers) or screened to a high-quality voicemail flow . So instead of being disrupted with every phone call, you can check who is calling and see what they want, then choose to call or text them back at your convenience. For those of you wanting to declare phone call bankruptcy, we think this product could be for you. We got a lot of positive feedback and good suggestions from beta users over the past few months, and we’re eager to hear what a wider group of PH users thinks about it. So, questions and comments are very welcome!
Steve
Based on the description, this looks to have the makings of a great service. Would be interested to feedback you received from beta testers and to hear testimonials from peeps who have actually used the service.
Greg Cohn
@sjackson Thanks for the comment. We've had a lot of feedback including a number of folks who said they couldn't live without it, but my favorite comment was simply, "Why is it all the companies out there don't use a whitelist?" There's some actual data from our beta in this post: https://www.burnerapp.com/blog/w...