Setup a phone number for a low cost voicemail box

Use Twilio to create a number and have a voicemail message (and record messages) — the lowest cost business phone.

Recently I needed to have a business phone number to satisfy some business requirements. However, the business doesn’t have a main/headquarters phone number, as it’s very small and we simply don’t do business by phone (we just use our own mobile phones). But, we didn’t want to give our our number(s) for this purpose.

Initially I thought to use Google Voice, but this had two downsides:

1. The cost is “expensive” for a number that would almost never be used or even called ($10/month).
2. Google Voice numbers are tied to a specific user, which we didn’t want.

I looked at various other VOIP services and so on, but they were all at least as expensive as Google voice, if not often quite a bit more. These are intended to be used as actual phone services, so the cost for what they provide is not bad, it just didn’t meet our needs.

Solution

Twilio to the rescue. I was able to purchase a number ($1.15/month), and then create a voicemail for it, and enable recording of messages for anyone who did actually call it and leave a message. You do pay per minute of time someone leaves a message, but again, assuming we expect nearly zero calls, this will be $1.15 vs. $10 month, a much better deal, and actually somewhat easier to work with for us.