Switchboard is a self-hosted communications console I built so I could manage my own VoIP numbers from one place.
Most people have one phone number. They use it for friends, family, banks, utilities, online accounts, medical offices, business cards, websites, delivery services, and everything else. Although this is convenient, it means that your phone number is tied, at a fundamental level, to your entire life. It becomes a universal identifier.
If you run a public-facing business, the problem gets worse. Everybody knows “your” phone number. It is on your website, invoices, emails, search listings, and customer phones. But if that same number is also connected to your bank, email recovery, personal accounts, or other sensitive services, then your public business identity and your private security identity are unnecessarily tied together. This is extremely useful to data brokers, but is also useful to malevolent actors of all kinds.
The case for separate numbers
One of the ideas I took from reading Michael Bazzell‘s privacy work is that phone numbers should be compartmentalized. A number used publicly should not be the same number used for banking, account recovery, private contacts, vendors, or temporary online services. In fact, you might choose to use different phone numbers in every part of your life.
SIM swapping, social engineering, account recovery abuse, spam, phishing, and data-broker exposure all become more dangerous when one phone number connects everything. But if you use different phone numbers for everything, data brokers and attackers don’t gain hardly any meaningful information if they know only your number in one compartment of your life. Learning that you used a certain phone number at a gas station doesn’t let them know where you work, or what number you use at your bank.
Why VoIP made this practical
Once I started using my own Telnyx VoIP numbers, I realized how useful this could be. A VoIP number does not have to live inside one physical phone or one carrier app. It can be routed, labeled, organized, and managed like infrastructure.
I wanted to text from my computer, check messages from my phone, search old conversations, receive voicemail, handle fax when needed, and keep everything together without relying on a pile of separate third-party apps.
There are platforms such as MySudo by Anonyome Labs that do this nicely, parceling out different phone numbers for different aliases. However, I didn’t find these services to be customizable enough for my purposes. They also attempted to integrate other services, such as email and payment, that I already had excellent solutions for.
I started writing my own “texting app” in 2021, but it was very clunky, and lacked common features like group messages, reactions, and picture messages. Plus, I had some issues with using multiple phone numbers: At one point, I texted a client from three different phone numbers in one conversation, and I think that might have lost me the job!
Over the years, I developed it and added these modern niceties. Five years later, that texting program evolved into Switchboard.
What Switchboard does
Switchboard is a local-first web console for managing VoIP communications. It supports SMS, MMS, group texting, voicemail, inbound fax, contacts, media, sender identities, and multiple phone numbers through providers such as Telnyx and Twilio.
For me, the most important feature is not any single checkbox. It is the fact that all of this lives in one interface I control.
- Text from a full computer keyboard
- Use multiple sender numbers from one interface from multiple services
- Keep business, personal, vendor, and account numbers separate
- Search conversations and message history
- Receive voicemail transcripts in the same conversation thread in the same system
- Handle fax without a separate portal
- Access the same system from my phone
- Keep local records instead of depending entirely on a closed app
That combination is what makes it useful. It gives me the convenience of a unified inbox without forcing me back into the risk of one universal phone number.
Open source
Switchboard is open source and available on GitHub. It is not a commercial phone service, and I am not selling VoIP accounts. This works only your own supplied VoIP numbers. It is a tool I built because I wanted a safer, cleaner, more convenient way to manage my own numbers.
