Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Baby's first international landline
Hi HN, As a weekend project, I hacked together a physical phone, a Raspberry Pi running Asterisk and Twilio, to let toddlers safely make international calls. I’ve documented the setup in this write-up and published the code + Ansible playbooks on GitHub so others can replicate it. I built this so kids of expats can easily stay in touch with family on other continents. Would love feedback from anyone who’s worked on something similar or tries building this themselves! writeup: https://wip.tf/posts/telefonefix-building-babys-first-intern... github repos: -…
Baby's First International Landline is a DIY physical phone system built on a Raspberry Pi running Asterisk and Twilio, designed to let toddlers make international calls safely. It is intended for young children of… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…
2023 · beeper.com · its alternatives →
- 2BA
Hi. I heard HN likes e-paper gadgets so I wanted to share a little side project I’ve been working on with @sqfmi. We’re building Beepberry - a portable e-paper computer for hackers, designed for chatting on Beeper. My day job is running Beeper [0], but I will always have a soft spot for building hardware. I wanted to create a ‘weekend’ device that would let me stay in touch with friends and family, without the distractions of a full smartphone. I imagined a tiny, hackable e-paper screen with a physical keyboard, powered by a Raspberry Pi, that I could use to chat around my home…and pretty…
2023 · beepberry.sqfmi.com · its alternatives →
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Adventures with rotary phones and asterisk. Contribute to mnutt/rotary development by creating an account on GitHub.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

I built Voklit because I was tired of paying $2+/min to call banks and airlines overseas. Needed a US number that works anywhere with actual affordable rates. It's a web-based VoIP service (mobile apps coming soon). You get a real US phone number, pay-as-you-go minutes on top of a small subscription that covers the infrastructure. Bootstrapped, solo founder. Built with [Go/Next.js/ and Websockets] if anyone's curious about the stack. Adding more countries soon. Happy to answer questions or hear feedback.
Jan 2026 · voklit.com · its alternatives →
- 5

A few months ago, I was inspired by this post on Reddit, titled: Food items should have QR codes that instruct the microwave exactly what to do. Like high for 2 minutes, let stand 1 minute, medium 1 minutes.. I thought this was a pretty cool idea, and that it
2013 · madebynathan.com · its alternatives →
- 6

A Flipper Zero clone, but cheapest, DIY and simply Open Source, made with Arduino IDE - lraton/FlopperZiro
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7

Alt link: https://mrchristmas.com/products/santas-magical-telephone Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7QJxZWFQg The first time I talked with AI santa and it responded with a joke I was HOOKED. The fun/nonsense doesn't click until you try it yourself. What's even more exciting is you can build it yourself: libpeer: https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer pion: https://github.com/pion/webrtc Then go do all your fun logic in your Pion server. Connect to any Voice AI provider, or roll your own via Open Source.…
2025 · walmart.com · its alternatives →
- 8IB
2021 · chordata.cc · its alternatives →
- 9OC
Hello HN community, This is bootstrapped/indie hacker-ish. Would appreciate feedback. What it is: You create a link (e.g. onair/yourname), and anyone can call you from it. Caller uses a web browser to make the call (not dedicated app). You can create as many links as you want, and can direct calls to colleagues in a round-robin or escalation manner. In a way, it's like the "opposite of Calendly"; whereas Calendly is about meetings in the future, OnAir is about immediate meetings. Motivation behind it: One of our SaaS products was struggling to grow. We believed that if we provide…
2024 · onair.io · its alternatives →
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ZippCall▲136You may have heard Microsoft is closing down Skype in a month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202052#43202881 As someone originally from the UK who spends a significant amount of time in Morocco, I constantly faced the challenge of making affordable and straightforward calls back home, especially to essential services like my bank or credit card company - Skype always made it easier for me with their outgoing to calls to a regular phone number. I used Skype 2/3 times a week. When I heard they were closing down, and saw a post by @levelsio on X, I put my head to…
2025 · zippcall.com · its alternatives →
- 12

Kytephone turns any Android into a safe kid
2012 · kytephone.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Linux-based CPE for Telia's (AS3249) "Koduinternet" service - tonusoo/koduinternet-cpe
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14

A global contest to grow and monitor your own food with Raspberry Pi - alexellis/growlab
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15

Hey all, Just wanted to show off this app I built, its a LAN based WebRTC baby monitor that connects any apple devices together over WIFI so you can turn an old iPad or iPhone into a baby monitor! I got a bit sick of all the sketchy products that require you to buy another device and may or may not connect to Chinese servers and store all your information somewhere. So I figured what if there were no servers and we could just use our existing devices! I would love any feedback! You will need two apple devices to test it, but simulators do work.
2025 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Sproutcall▲27Cheap international phone calls in a dead simple UI
2025 · sproutcall.com · its alternatives →
- 17

Hello all - Inspired by many who build/assemble for their daughters/sons, I took cue and assembled a two-way communication between my son and his friends. Nothing spectacular. Just basic stuff to talk. He is eleven and doesn't have a phone. I wanted him to talk to his friends without an account, a feed, or an algorithm in between, so I built five ESP32-S3 touchscreen units, one per kid. Tap a friend's name, their unit rings. Tap Everyone, they all ring. Each unit dials outbound to a relay I run, so no house opens a port. Audio is uncompressed 16 kHz PCM in 20 ms frames, AES-256-GCM…
Aug 2026 · sundaradnus.ca · its alternatives →
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A pager▲104Hello HN, I basically don't use notifications for anything. The noise is too much. Slack is too loud. Email is too slow. But sometimes you do need a note in your face. I found myself missing 1990s pagers. I wanted a digital equivalent - something that does one thing: beep until I ack it. So I built UDP-7777. Concept: - 0% Cloud: It listens on UDP Port 7777. No accounts, no central servers. You don't need Tailscale/ZeroTier/WG/etc, it's just easy for device sets. - CAPCODES: It maps your IP address (LAN or Tailscale) to a retro 10-digit "CAPCODE" that looks like a phone number…
Dec 2025 · udp7777.com · its alternatives →
- 19IM
I built a little script that gives me a fake phone call to escape boring and awkward situations. I bought a virtual number from twilio and saved it as one of my relatives. Whenever I feel stuck, I just tap a button called “ESCAPE” on my phone. It sends a request to my remote server. The server runs a small Python script which schedules an actual call. After a minute, my phone rings and plays a pre-recorded audio. I simply say “sorry, I’m getting a call” and walk away. A tiny project, but it has saved me so many times. Script -…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Inspired by a trip to Haiti...
2015 · soundcloud.com · its alternatives →
- 21IB
I am not sure if this is fits the HN community, but I am posting it here if people are interested. This is the current iteration of the car: http://i.imgur.com/ko8YBh.jpg Details: I wrote a simple android app that streams the accelerometer data from the phone to the pi over a simple socket. The pi then uses this data to drive the DC motor and the servo motor. Tilting the phone to control the car feels very natural. In this[0] pic you can see the wifi dongle I've used. I am using Adafruit Occidental v0.2[1] as my OS because it has support for my wifi dongle. It also makes some hardware…
2012 · i.imgur.com · its alternatives →
- 22AB
2015 · raspchat.ngrok.io · its alternatives →
- 23WB
http://picirus.com For Startup Weekend Tulsa, we created a small low-power appliance (built on Raspberry Pi) that you connect to your different cloud accounts -- Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, etc. -- and it downloads a copy of all your stuff every night. I was thinking about all the people I love who share directly to the cloud, without a lot of planning for the case where their Facebook account gets hacked, their Dropbox account has a glitch, or one of these services they love goes out of business suddenly some day. We had a ton of fun building Picirus during Startup Weekend. I highly…
2012 · picirus.com · its alternatives →
- 24

I built a software-defined radio transmission platform that runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. It spawns its own WiFi hotspot and serves a web UI — connect from any device and you have a portable RF signal generator with 12 transmission modes: FM broadcasting with RDS, FT8, RTTY, FSK, POCSAG paging, Morse code, SSTV image transmission, voice cloning via live mic, spectrum painting, IQ replay, carrier wave, and frequency sweeps. Everything runs through a browser interface. Upload audio files, type messages, configure frequencies, and transmit. The Pi's GPIO pin does the actual RF generation via…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android alternatives
- Beepberry – a portable e-paper computer for hackers alternatives
- Rotary Phone Project alternatives
- I built an international calling platform for the past 6 months alternatives
- I hacked my microwave with a Raspberry Pi alternatives
- FlopperZiro – A DIY open-source Flipper Zero clone alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →