Honest answers, including the ones other services bury.

Yes. These are real US numbers assigned to you through a licensed carrier, and giving a company a number you control instead of your personal line is legal, the same way a second email address is. What is not allowed: fraud, impersonation, harassment, or getting around an identity check that exists by law. Do any of that and the account is closed.

Most will. Codes from stores, delivery apps, marketplaces and most sign-up flows land in your dashboard in seconds. Some services reject virtual numbers outright, and when they do there is no workaround on our side. We are not going to promise you 100 percent, because nobody can.

Some do. Banks, crypto exchanges and a few government portals check whether a number is a mobile line and turn away anything that is not. Nothing we do changes that answer. Use your real number for the handful of accounts you cannot afford to be locked out of, and use these for everything else.

No. Numbers are receive-only: they take calls and texts, they never make them. You cannot dial out, and you cannot reply to a text from your dashboard. The only message we ever send is the one-time code that verifies your forwarding number.

No. These numbers cannot place a call of any kind, and that includes 911. This is not a replacement for a phone line. Keep your real one for emergencies.

Forwarding stops immediately, so calls and texts to that number stop reaching you. It then sits in quarantine for 30 days before it can go back into circulation, so nobody inherits your spam. Burning is permanent: you cannot get that number back, so move anything you signed up for with it first. Your message history stays in the dashboard, and the number's metadata is deleted 90 days after it is released.

Two reasons. It is where forwarded calls ring, so it has to be a real line that answers. And one free account per verified mobile is what stops people farming free numbers, which is the thing that wrecks deliverability for everyone else.

Inbound, yes. Picture messages up to 5 MB are stored and shown with the rest of the thread. Anything larger appears as a message we could not store. You cannot send one back, because the numbers are receive-only.

1 US number, 50 forwarded call minutes that never reset, and inbound texts within fair use (500 per number per month). No card. You can replace that number once per calendar month. If the account goes unused we warn you at 60 days and release the number at 90.

On Free, forwarding pauses once the 50 lifetime minutes are gone and your texts keep arriving. On Basic and Pro, extra minutes are 5 cents each, capped at $50 a month on Basic and $100 on Pro. At the cap, forwarding pauses for the rest of the period and texts still come through. We email you at 80 percent of your minutes, and again the moment overage starts.

Yes. Once your carrier picks up, voicemail included, the call counts as answered time and bills as minutes, rounded up per call: 65 seconds is 2 minutes. Set a number to Block or SMS-only if you do not want it spending minutes at all.

You keep everything until the end of the period you already paid for. After that the account drops to Free: your oldest live number stays, and the rest are burned and quarantined. There are no partial refunds, no surprise charges, and free lifetime minutes you have already used do not come back.