Putting a Pay Wall on My Cell Phone Number

I get a spam calls daily. The spam caller’s number tries to look familiar by generating a number similar to my own, or using triple 8, or some variation of that. This is despite the fact that my number is registered to the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry. Being one of the larger government agencies though, I can’t say I expected much in the first place… but still, you had one job guys.

‍

Adding a paywall to my cell phone number

This consistent calling day after day, usually multiple times per day, eventually prompted me to simply google “pay wall for my personal number”. If you want to hit me with spam calls, go right ahead. I just ask that you pay for my time (not that I was picking up these calls to begin with). I’m more than happy to pick up for dollars though. Sounds simple…It’s not. In fact, this doesn’t exist at all.

After many altered versions of this search, I turned up nothing. Like not even remotely anything close to what I’m looking for. Maybe I’m just searching with the wrong keywords, but there is literally nothing on this topic that I could find.

‍

This is what the experience should feel like

*Ring ring*, “Oh look,I’m getting a call from a number that’s not in my contacts as they've paid to put this call through.” If you’re not in my contacts, and you call my number, you will get notified before the call goes through that my number costs $100 to call (yes, that’s what I would set it to). Then, using your Android Pay, Apple Pay, or manual over-the-phone credit card entry, you could pay to call my phone number. From my end, I would see that someone has paid to call me, so I’m personally incentivized to pick up for no other reason than you put in the monetary effort to get this far. If you called my number but refused to pay, I would never know because the call would never get connected.

Below is a user interface I created to show the settings page of this service, as well as what it might look like when someone is calling you. These screens do not represent what it would look like for the caller who just paid. This just represents what I would be able to see in my settings and when someone calls.

‍

‍

Technical Difficulties

The world of telecom is not my specialty.  Having done some light research on the topic though, I can’t quite determine where the real implementation of this sits. Does having a paywall between a phone number and a caller lie squarely in the hands of the telecom giants? Maybe Apple, Google, Samsung, or other phone manufacturers could integrate this as a simple software update? How would sending money from one anonymous caller to another work? Would it have to be an on-chain payment? Who handles final settlement? There’s a lot of questions here, none of which I’m qualified to answer.

The technical aspect doesn’t concern me at all though. When the bedrock is 1’s and 0’s, whether it’s technically possible is rarely the question. The real question is, is this a potentially profitable business idea, and how much capital does this require in order to get this to MVP (minimal viable product) status?

‍

How it’s Monetized

This product would almost certainly be monetized the same way a credit card company makes money off merchants, or the same way Stripe charges me when I get paid by clients. Take a small percentage of each transaction. In this example, I use Stripe’s 2.9% +$0.30 rule. Whether or not that’s sufficient I’m not sure. However, because you get to pick the price as a user, you can essentially budget that into your paywall price.

‍

System Features & Function

Let’s say you paid to call me but I don’t pick up. You can leave a voice message, and I’ll call you back. Or hell, depending on where the funds are held, maybe the money can sit in some type of digital short term escrow account and if I don’t return the call by a certain time afterwards, you get 75% of you money back. Something like that.

Additional features, since we’ve got this built anyway, would potentially be the option to charge by the minute instead of just up-front.

‍

I want to know more

As mentioned earlier, the telecoms business is not my specialty. If it’s yours, please reach out to me as I’d love to understand this problem down to the metal. The idea of using money as a barrier is one that’s been with me for a while now. In an age where everything is “free” (in exchange for all of your personal info so you can be marketed to), is not a future I’m particularly fond of. There’s a reason I have no personal social media accounts outside of my LinkedIn. As such, technology that either allows for the user to share in profits from their information, or profit from some form of monetary gate is quite appealing to me. Why seemingly no one has tried this with modern day cell phones though, I have no idea. There could be a really good reason for that which I’m simply not ingrained enough in the industry to know.

‍

Personal cell phone paywall as a start-up

If by some random chance this is something you’re building already, as a start-up or otherwise, I’d be interested in investing, or at the very least, learning more about your goals with this. You can reach via my contact page.

If you happen to dig up my number somewhere and decide to call me instead, enjoy it while it’s still free.

‍