We have never known who our customers are.
That is not marketing. It is an architecture decision made in 2019 that we have refused to walk back, through 7 years, 68 countries and 2.9M numbers.
Story
The short version
HushSMS opened in 2019 with six countries, SMS only, and Bitcoin as the only way to pay. The reason it existed was narrow: one of us needed a second number for a project, discovered that every route to one required either a passport scan or an existing verified number, and concluded that the market had a hole in it.
The decision that has mattered most was made in the first week and was barely a decision at all. The order table has columns for country, line type, term and payment status. It does not have a column for a name, because when the schema was written nobody thought to add one.
Every year since, someone has proposed adding it — for support, for fraud scoring, for a loyalty scheme, once for a partnership that would have doubled revenue. The answer has been no every time, and it is easier to keep saying no when the alternative involves a migration.
Along the way: voice in 2021, two-way SMS in 2022, the setup fee removed in 2023, Monero settlement in 2024, the panel rebuilt and the last third-party script deleted in 2025, and published per-service success rates in 2026. The changelog has all of it, including the releases that broke something.
What has not changed is the shape of the thing. 7 years, 68 countries, 2.9M numbers, and not one customer whose identity we could produce if someone asked.
Constraints
What we will not do
We will not collect an identity
Not a name, not a document, not a card. There is no field for one in the schema and adding one would require rewriting the order table. That is the point: the constraint is structural, not a policy we could quietly relax on a bad quarter.
We will not sell a line that cannot work
PayPal, Revolut and Wise reject virtual ranges at onboarding. We list them as unsupported and block them at checkout. Every competitor we have checked takes that order and argues about the refund afterwards.
We will not run third-party scripts
No analytics, no tag manager, no CDN beacon, no session recorder. We know how many orders we took because we processed them, and that is all we need to know.
We will not hide an incident
Every outage since 2019 is on the status page and in the changelog, including the January 2026 one that dropped SMS in four countries for 47 minutes because we shipped a route change badly.
We will not tolerate abuse
Fraud, impersonation, harassment and spam get the line terminated within 24 hours of a valid report, without refund. A provider that looks the other way loses its carrier ranges, and then nobody gets a number.
We will not pretend to be bigger than we are
There is no sales team, no enterprise tier and no investors. Prices are a published formula because there is nobody here to negotiate with.
Timeline
Where we are now
May 14, 2026 · v4.5
Nine new countries
Added Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Uruguay, Panama and Costa Rica.
June 24, 2025 · v4.0
Panel rebuild
Rebuilt the panel as a static application. First contentful paint dropped from 2.4s to under 400ms.
September 30, 2024 · v3.4
Monero settlement
Added Monero as a settlement asset. It is now the most-used payment method on the site.
October 12, 2023 · v3.0
Removed the setup fee
Dropped the $8 provisioning fee entirely. It covered a manual step we had automated eighteen months earlier.
May 6, 2021 · v2.0
Voice
Real inbound calls with forwarding to any number or SIP endpoint.
March 11, 2019 · v1.0
HushSMS opens
Six countries, SMS only, Bitcoin only.
People
Who runs this
A small distributed team. We do not publish names — it would be strange to protect yours and not ours.
Ask us anything — [email protected]. Median reply 4h.