Phone Phlinger
What Is It?
Phone Phlinger is an app targeted towards rank and rent online businesses. Rank and rent businesses will develop web pages, locally rank them to the top of google, and then try to sell the leads that are generated from their website. Leads that come in from a phone number listed on the webpage are the most valuable, and easiest to convert to a sale. There are multiple choices for getting cheap local VOIP phone numbers online, Twilio is a well known provider. The Twilio interface is aimed at developers, and can be overwhelming to set up something as simple as call forwarding. Phone Phlinger makes call forwarding a breeze, along with lots of extras. Phone Phlinger can handle call forwarding, voicemail, whisper messages, caller greetings, call recording, and call tracking with email notifications.
Can You Show Me A Demo?
Of course! Check out the demo video! I only use a trial Twilio account for testing calls, so please ignore the warning message at the start of my phone calls. A paid Twilio account wont have those warnings. Also sorry for the blurs, those are my actual phone numbers and personal email addresses!
How Does It Work?
Well, that's a secret! Actually, it's just a little convuluted to maintain it's 0$ spending limit. Phone Phlinger has taken on many shapes, from a simple flask backend, to hosted on amazon ec2 (turns out thats not free), to what it is today!
The front end is built with NextJS, using twilio's paste package for a lot of designs, the site is hosted on vercel. There is a Postgres Database which handles user information, accessed with prisma. Login information is handled by auth0. All phone logic is handled by twilio serverless functions, which are uploaded to users twilio accounts from a python backend hosted on pythonanywhere by running a bash script accessing the twilio command line interface tool. User recordings (for voicemails, caller greetings, whisper messages) are stored in an amazon s3 bucket, as per twilio documentation. Updating information on the webpage Phone Phlinger edits JSON data saved on users specific twilio sync accounts. The emails are from the gmail API, also accessed through the python backend.
I understand that was a bit of a mouthful, but I'm happy to talk about anything more in depth, just get in contact with me!
Why Did I Make This?
The origins of Phone Phlinger came from a conversation with someone about the frustrations with the cost of similar call tracking software.
I took a look into Twilio's API and figured I would be able to offer assistance in making a simple application that could handle the needs of this client. Besides, any developer can make simple CRUD app like a To-Do list, or mock e-commerce by following online tutorials... I can assure you, there was no walkthrough on how to create a call handling and call tracking app.
So, in my spare time while backpacking across Asia, the Phlinger was born!
It is in a state of perpetual updates, and feature additions. On-boarding of new clients still requires a manual process, but apart from the inital setup, everything is working exceptionally for all of my clients. (There's one, I have one client for this.)