adamonduty

I went down a similar road in 2013 and contacted heroku via a support ticket. They said they "do not offer up [their] certs for verification" and wouldn't answer any other questions. Doesn't seem like much has changed :/

Another one - "prefect" should be "perfect".

Rails works quite nicely as a REST backend. Its also much faster in my experience to render json than HTML templates. Rails is great as a general starting point, letting you choose SPA at the start or later.

I've combined Postgres views and set returning functions in rails and had a lot of success with good performance and good maintainability, too. No custom SQL required in the application itself.

I'm a little scared that this builds SQL statements directly. Did you consider at least using prepared statements? Was there such an awful performance hit using ActiveRecord, or something that couldn't be done with it?

I wish I could add some comments while submitting the speed test. The wifi in my hotel is free, but the speed I'm receiving is only obtainable by using a code provided by the front desk. The normal speeds are quite a bit slower.

Please email me your number at [email protected] and I'll manually fix it.

PhoneCard probably didn't like your destination number (either invalid or deemed too much for the test call). If you (or anyone else) would like to give the real thing a spin in exchange for some feedback or ideas to make the app better, please email me at [email protected] and I'll give your account some free credit.

Well, number purchases do work when you top up with credit first! :) The problem amounts to the app realizing you don't have any credit but not showing an error message. This is the top issue I'm working to fix.

FYI, pairing PhoneCard with Google Voice can require a few tries. I've had issues intermittently where Google Voice wouldn't ring for the verification call, and even then it didn't always forward to PhoneCard like it should. Then again, Google Voice often causes me to miss calls.

If anyone else has problems crop up, please email me at [email protected].

PhoneCard is entirely powered by Twilio.

Actually it looks fairly similar! PhoneCard has multi-ring on incoming calls which I don't see there, but I didn't investigate deeply. How is the call quality?

Oh, and SMS is quite a bit more limited at this time. You wouldn't be able to send SMS from Serbia to another country, or SMS within Serbia, but you could purchase a number in a destination country like the US or UK and send/receive SMS via the webapp.

Awesome! I agree that I need to improve the cost discoverability. The problem is the matrix of rates is huge. In some countries, costs are different per mobile provider, and landlines are usually half the cost or less than mobiles. For example, calling Serbian landline to the US would be roughly $0.20 per minute. Serbian mobile to the US would be roughly $0.55 per minute. That all changes when you call somewhere else.

Of course many countries are not nearly so much. I also do plan to add voip calling within the app. This would allow you to skip the high cost of crossing Serbian boundaries when you're near a decent internet connection, but give you flexibility to make calls directly over the PSTN when needed.