What I’ve seen is a lot of people using textnow. That doesn’t work in Europe. Any recommendations or advice on how to set stuff up. I would like my set up to be as cheap as possible. Any recommendations?
hey! european scambaiter here! while not free, but a good choice, zadarma. they offer US numbers and european, for good prices. i use them personally, and you can have zadarma host the call server for you using their ‘Cloud PBX’, or if you’re more advanced (like me) you can selfhost your own call server (PBX)
one of the downsides of zadarma is that you need to pay for the number monthly + credit to call outbound to the scammers, but inbound calls are free
Although also not free, but cheap and two good choices - I use a VoIP carrier and I used to pair that with microsip.org/downloads (free desktop application for making and receiving calls).
Since then though, I’ve brought my own deskphone for cheap (as I also have my own personal/business uses) which is the Fanvil X6U-V2, and simply now prefer a proper deskphone which works great, which I brought around the start of the year/end of last year. I recommend either TELNYX.COM or VOIP.MS as your carrier. I’ve used them both, I started with VOIP.MS, moved to TELNYX.COM and have moved back to VOIP.MS!
Not free, but also not expensive, setup your own asterisk server on a cheap host like Digital Ocean, or a free-tier AWS (just remember to shut it off before it’s trial period). Aso setup deskphones (or ATA’s) like @MehNamesJeff did. While yes, you’re paying for it, you will also learn yourself some useful skills in server administration, OS troubleshooting, and how VOIP works.