Why GotMyNumber is free

What we got fed up with

You miss a call from a number you don’t recognise. You type it into a search engine. What happens next is familiar to everybody: a page that loads and then covers itself with a box you have to close, a warning that your device may be at risk, a promise that the name is available if you just continue, and then another page, and another. Five clicks later you still do not know who rang, and something is now asking for your card details.

We wanted the one-click version. Type the number, get what is actually known about it, leave. That is the whole product, and none of the rest of it was ever necessary — it exists to make money from people who are worried, which is a poor way to treat somebody who is worried.

What we decided not to do

• No pop-ups and no interruptions. Nothing overlays the answer. Anything we have to say waits until after you have it.
• No spammy ads and no fake sites. No ad network, no auction, no tracking pixels, and nothing linked from here that we have not checked ourselves. A sponsor is a different thing, and the difference is set out below.
• No sign-up and no login to look up a number.
• No selling personal data, and no third-party analytics. What we hold and for how long is set out in the privacy policy.
• No safety score. A report is one person’s unchecked account, and a number nobody has reported has usually just never been reported — it is not evidence of anything. Why we show what we show is in how GotMyNumber works.
• No naming a private person against a phone number, and no payment unlocks one. Only a business that has proved it holds the line is shown by name.

What it costs

Servers, a domain, the numbering data the lookups are built on, and a fair number of evenings. It is not enormous and we are not pretending otherwise. It is also not nothing, and it does not stop because nobody paid this month.

How it stays free

Two ways, and the first one matters more than the second.

People share it. Someone checks a number, finds it useful, and sends it to the family group. That is how almost everybody here arrived, and it is worth more to us than money, because it keeps working after the fact.

Some people buy us a coffee. Three pounds, no account needed, entirely optional, and nothing on the site changes whether you do or you don’t. There is no member version. This is the same site for everybody.

If we ever take a sponsor

We would rather say this now, while it costs us nothing to say, than after the fact when it would sound like an excuse.

A sponsor is not an advert, and that is not a word game. An advert is bought by whoever pays for it, served by a network that follows you from site to site, and put in front of you because of who you are. A sponsor here would be a named local business that has proved it holds its own number, shown on the page for its own town, labelled as a sponsor, with nothing following you and nothing loaded from anybody else’s server. If we could not hold that line, we would not take the money.

It is possible that one day a local business pays to appear on the page for its own town. If that happens: it will be labelled, it will sit in the page, after the answer, and it will be a business that has proved it holds its number — the control is verification, never payment. It will never overlay, never follow you down the page, and never interrupt what you came for.

The promise that does not change, whatever else does: no pop-ups, no interruptions, no spammy ads or fake sites.

Either way, you get the same thing

A free lookup, no login, and facts with a source attached. What we store while you use it is in the privacy policy, and how we look after it is in security.

Check a number.