About Airlophone
Airlophone is a browser-based international calling service. Call landlines and mobiles in 220+ countries with no app, no SIM card and no roaming. Every rate is published, billing is per second after a one-minute minimum, and credits never expire.
Who makes it
Airlophone is built by EchoForge, an independent app studio run by Fabio Jonathan Arifin from Jakarta, Indonesia. It is not a carrier and not a reseller of a white-label app: the dialer, the rate engine and the billing are built here, and calls are carried over licensed carrier networks.
It is a small operation, and saying so is more useful than implying otherwise. There is no support floor. What there is instead is a product that publishes every price before you pay, refunds credit you have not spent, and states its own limits on the page rather than in a terms document.
How it makes money
You buy prepaid credit and calls draw it down at the published per-minute rate. There is no subscription, no monthly fee and no connection charge. We make a margin on the minutes, and that margin is the entire business model, which is why the rate card is published in full rather than shown after signup.
Credit does not expire, and unused credit is refundable to the original payment method on request. A call that fails, drops or is unusable is credited back. Billing is a 60 second minimum and then per second, rather than rounding every partial minute up to a whole one.
Rates are set per country and per band from a carrier rate deck, and the band is resolved from the digits you dial rather than from a question you are asked to guess at. All 220+ countries are on the published card.
What it deliberately cannot do
These are stated here, on the pricing page, in the help pages and at signup, because finding them out after paying is a refund and a bad afternoon.
- No emergency services
- Airlophone cannot reach 911, 999, 112 or their equivalents anywhere, and cannot report your location to a dispatcher. Keep a phone that can.
- The caller ID is not your own number
- Outbound calls carry a number we assign. If an institution verifies you by the number you are calling from, that check will not pass and you should expect additional security questions.
- Calling is outbound only
- The dialer places calls; it does not receive them. A rented number can receive calls and texts, but it cannot send texts, and most institutions deliberately reject internet phone numbers for two-factor codes.
- Premium-rate numbers are refused
- Ranges that exist to bill the caller heavily are refused rather than priced, so a misdialled premium number cannot run up a bill.
What we do with your data
The number you dial never leaves our infrastructure. It is not sent to any analytics or error-reporting service, hashed or otherwise. Who you called and when is the shape of your private life, and it is the one thing here that no third-party vendor has any business storing.
Session recording is switched off in code rather than in a dashboard, because a replay of this product would be a video of somebody typing a phone number and then talking to whoever answered. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
Getting in touch
Email [email protected]. A real person reads it.