building a pay-as-you-go alternative to per-seat business international call phone systems (Currently at $125 MRR)
Been working on Teams for Airlophone lately.
Most business phone systems charge you monthly + per seat, which makes sense if your team is on the phone all day.
But there’s this weird middle ground where an individual or a company needs to call internationally, just not enough to justify paying for another phone system every month. That’s what I’m building Airlophone around.
One shared wallet, invite your team, set limits, and everyone just pays for whatever calls they actually make.
Also working on AI notes for recorded calls. it takes the call + whatever notes you typed yourself and puts everything together after.
Basically Granola but for your phone calls.
Airlophone did ~$125 in the last 4 weeks from 19 payments. still tiny and I’m very much figuring out distribution, but pretty cool seeing strangers actually paying for and using it.
still building Teams rn. would love to get a few companies using it while I figure this out.
Hi Fabio, I'm Novruz, a QA engineer who tests products before launch. Since Teams is the next thing you're selling, I read it the way an office manager comparing it with a per-seat system would. The homepage says "No fees on top: no connection fee, no surcharge". The Teams page and the Terms say every team account is Professional and adds $0.02 a minute to each call, which on a US number listed at $0.02 doubles the rate. It is disclosed, just not where the promise sits. The wallet itself, member limits and what a member sees, I can't check from outside. Thanks for sharing real numbers, 19 payments from strangers is a good sign.
Great catch, the Professional rate is disclosed, and the keypad shows the final total, but “no surcharge” on the homepage is a stale copy. I'm updating this, Thanks for catching this and letting me know!
Congrats on the 19 payments — strangers paying is the signal that matters at this stage.
A market thought from Nigeria: pay-as-you-go isn't a compromise here, it's the default. Airtime, data, everything — we pay for exactly what we use, and subscription fatigue is real when income is irregular. A lot of SMEs here call China, Dubai and Turkey weekly for trade and would never justify a per-seat phone system — but would absolutely top up a shared wallet. If you ever test emerging markets, your pricing model already speaks the local language.
On distribution — I launched my own product on Product Hunt last week and got 2 points, so I feel the "figuring it out" part deeply. What's slowly working for me: finding the one place my buyers already ask questions and showing up there consistently, instead of spraying everywhere. For international calling that might be expat and trade communities rather than general startup channels.
Watching the Teams rollout — shared wallet + per-member limits sounds like the actual unlock for small companies.
Thank you! this is a really great insights, do you know what kind SME industry usually use this kind of product? I'm trying to look into what kind of industries that would fit the product for the B2B. Trade communities do make a lot of sense for this product.
I’d push back on the shared wallet idea a bit. It sounds cleaner for companies, but doesn’t it create an awkward control problem once you have several employees making international calls from the same balance?
If one person suddenly burns through a big chunk of the wallet, the “pay only for what you use” advantage could start feeling less predictable than per-seat pricing. Are the per-user limits meant to solve that completely, or are you considering separate departmental budgets/approval rules too?
i think it really comes down to product market fit. for heavy callers like a call center, per-seat monthly plans make sense. but for businesses like trading firms where call volumes fluctuate, pay as you go saves them a ton of money.
i get your concern about predictability, but we handle that in two ways. first, admins can set hard usage limits per member, and team members can just request a budget bump if they need it. second, we give them proper analytics showing real-time graphs of spending, pickup rates, and individual usage.
with those controls in place, it becomes flexibility instead of unpredictability. it depends on the usage, but on most of the cases of the team users, not everyone on a team has the same needs. an outbound rep might burn through balance, while two admin teammates handling mostly inbound need almost nothing. pay as you go lets them only pay for what they actually use instead of buying expensive seats for everyone.
Good point. Did you test that with users before committing to it?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
The "weird middle ground" is exactly where the best bootstrapped products live. Too small for enterprise phone systems to care about, too real for people to just use their personal phone. That gap exists because incumbents optimize for their biggest customers, not for the edge case that doesn't justify a monthly seat.
The shared wallet with limits is smart because it solves the expense management problem without adding another approval workflow. We thought about similar usage-based pricing for UtilitySEO — our free scan runs up to 2,000 pages with no signup, but after that we went flat annual instead of pay-per-scan because at $125 MRR every pricing experiment is existential. You're too small to A/B test but also too early to lock in.
How are users finding you right now — is it search, word of mouth, or something specific to the international calling niche?
Thanks! yeah this is actually was Skype international call pricing style before microsoft killed it, and I saw that some people are trying to find an alternative. So far I'm adding to directory, throwing a few ads on linkedin and X and creating some relevant pSEO stuff.
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
I think is ideas very good and the volume also pretty impressive
Nice work! How long did it take you to build the first version?
Thanks! the initial version was abt 2 weeks. quite a standard speed in SF i'd say.
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
This positioning is spot on. The 'per-seat' pricing model for tools you only use twice a month is the biggest scam in B2B SaaS right now. Shared wallet with hard limits is exactly how you win over small teams who are tired of being nickeled and dimed. Good luck with the launch!
Thank you so much!
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Appreciate the build-in-public detail. On our side we kept the free tier honest (screen/parse only, not hire/reject) while growing: https://firstpass.surge.sh/#try — First Pass desk
Somehow the link is broken
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Thanks for sharing the numbers, that makes it much easier to follow.
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Helpful post. How did you get your first bit of traction?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Interesting. How are you measuring whether it is working?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Of the 19 payments, have any revealed recurring team or company usage—and what behavior would validate Teams as a stronger growth path than expanding individual calling demand?
So far, regarding pattern I'd say the churn would be low for teams unless we fucked up quite badly. but for individual users, many of them only need the service once and they're being upfront about it on the way out when i ask for feedback.
That difference between one-off individual use and recurring team demand is worth digging into. Could be useful to compare notes on that beyond the thread sometime.
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Love this angle. Building Xstream4K right now so this hits close to home — what made you look into it in the first place?
Nice, this makes a lot of sense. What's been the most surprising part of it so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
Nice work shipping it. What has been the biggest challenge since launch?
I'm looking into doing outbound for the b2b, it's the hardest so far for me
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting approach. What was the hardest part to get right?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Thankyou!
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Love this angle, honestly. What made you look into it in the first place?
I have banks and clients overseas and many of the entity I need to call kinda use landlines, I looked at dialpad and rebtel (recommended by some friends) but they have monthly subscription while I don't use it that frequently honestly, so I thought there must be some people out there with a simmilar issue. now I’m experimenting with the team side + AI notes bc I usually use AI notes for my clients meeting in general.