You’re a saint and make me feel incredibly guilty - I’ve got a friend who was recently sentenced to 25 years and I haven’t even bothered figuring out how to contact him or send him any money. Do you have any documentation on your twilio magic? I’d love to speak to him but I can’t stomach how much they charge for such basic things.
Thanks, and I'm so sorry about your friend. The Twilio magic is basic: buy a Twilio number that's as local as possible to the prison (say 999-#######), have it forward to the contact's real landline or cell (say 444-#######), then pay through connectnetwork.com for the 999 number to receive what are basically "collect" calls.
If you're just doing it for yourself, and you're not already using Google Voice (GV) or have a Google user id to spare, you can get the 999 local number through GV, and then have it forward to your landline/cell. That's a little cheaper than Twilio.
For Twilio, I use a "Twimlbin" for each number, see below. An added benefit is that the callee (the outside person taking the call) always sees the same caller id, and so can put that in their address book with a suitable label.
Connectnetwork also has a protocol (a little more complex and finicky than unattended collect calls) which require the callee to press the right keys to accept the calls (or to reject them). I sometimes get that wrong (one out of three times) and sometime the system seems finicky (I thought I did it right, but it still treats me as if I rejected the call). So our prisoner knows to call a few times.
If this is still complex, hit me up on email (in profile) or comment here. I'd be happy to help.
