Security and privacy decision
GhostSIM
A capable developer can build a single-user or small-scale replacement that provisions numbers and surfaces incoming codes, but reproducing the vendor's global number inventory, app-store apps, and refund/scale polish would be operationally heavy and costly to match.
Visit website↗Built by Semih, who ships 3 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off42 h to build
$50/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Provision a virtual phone number, receive an inbound SMS for that number, and display the verification code to the user.
What it still won’t have
- Global number inventory at scale (100+ countries)
- Automated refund and credit handling tuned to provider SLAs
- App-store presence and mobile apps (App Store / Google Play)
- Built-in referral/bonus-credit system
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
GhostSIM does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
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What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal GhostSIM replacement: use Node.js + Express backend, Postgres DB, and a React single-page frontend deployed in Docker with Caddy for TLS. Core features in scope: (1) admin config to add virtual-number provider credentials; (2) provision/purchase a number from the provider API and store mapping in Postgres; (3) webhook endpoint to receive inbound SMS, parse verification codes (regex), persist messages, and mark refunds if no SMS arrives in 20 minutes; (4) user UI to pick country, show active numbers and received messages, and copy codes; (5) Stripe integration for one-time credit packs and weekly/monthly subscriptions; (6) background job to reconcile provider billing and trigger refunds. Out of scope: building global number inventory negotiations, native App Store / Google Play mobile clients, and growth/referral systems beyond a simple promo-code credit. Include error handling for provider API failures, idempotent webhook processing, automated tests for webhook parsing and payments, and deployment scripts (Dockerfile + docker-compose).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- Evidence score52
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 1
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productGhostSIM — Virtual Numbers for SMS Verification
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
