Trapcall always know who`s calling

Over the past 9 months, TrapCall has received thousands of emails, tweets, Facebook posts, blog comments and phone calls requesting that TrapCall add support for Sprint. It was kind of a sore subject for us. But, truth be told, we love Sprint. Their wireless data network is great. However, one policy at Sprint had caused major roadblocks for TrapCall and the likelihood of TrapCall coming to Sprint….until Sprint dropped some great news on us this week!

Sprint currently charges 20 cents per minute, on top of airtime charges, for conditional call forwarding, which is the backbone of TrapCall’s service. This means that every unanswered, busy or rejected call sent to TrapCall and then sent back to your phone or your phone’s voicemail, costs 20 cents per minute. We felt it was in our best interest not to subject Sprint users to these charges – especially when most Sprint customers are unaware of these charges! You would be surprised at how many minutes per month a typical user ends up conditionally call forwarding once the service is activated. The charges can add up fast.

The worst part of all was that Sprint was the only large carrier with this policy. Most mobile carriers like conditional call forwarding. Why? Because it essentially creates two phone calls, allowing the carrier to charge double airtime minutes for these calls.

But things are changing fast at Sprint. Today, Sprint announced its “Open” approach to encourage mobile applications developers to take advantage of Sprints voice, data and messaging capabilities. After months and months, Sprint has finally listened to TrapCall and announced that they will be lifting the per-minute fees for conditional call forwarding beginning mid-November. A major win for TrapCall users!

Sprint issued a press release this afternoon stating, “Application developers have created a number of voicemail and messaging services that take advantage of call forwarding capabilities. Sprint announced today that it will not charge customers for certain types of call forwarding. Conditional call forwarding for busy calls or calls not answered using the customer`s wireless phone will be free, beginning mid-November.” No longer will users have to migrate away from Sprint to take advantage of TrapCall’s Caller ID unmasking, which we have seen in large numbers since launching TrapCall earlier this year.

Kudos, Sprint!

Starting in mid-November when Sprint’s new policies go into effect, TrapCall will begin testing Sprint’s network and its voice messaging compatibility with TrapCall. We’ll also be working to roll out support for Google Voice, so users can enjoy the benefits of both services at once, something we’re really excited about! (Google also recently announced they would begin supporting conditional call forwarding!)

So for all you Sprint users out there who are anxious to sign up for TrapCall, keep your fingers crossed that Sprint makes good on their promises to developers. Keep checking TrapCall’s blog, Facebook or Twitter for the latest updates. We promise you’ll be the first to know when TrapCall and Sprint play nice together, finally. We can’t wait to have you Sprint users onboard!

If your one of the many people who upgraded to a new iPhone 3G S yesterday don’t forget to reprogram TrapCall once you’ve successfully switched phones! To continue to take advantage of all of TrapCall’s features, be sure to log in to your TrapCall account and visit the “My Phone” page under the “Settings” tab for our programming codes. Once you’ve punched in the programming codes, you’ll once again be unmasking blocked calls, receiving voicemail transcriptions, missed call alerts and taking advantage of all the other features TrapCall has to offer!

Many of you were saddened by our recent changes to the way TrapCall handles your voicemail as we cut back our free Fly Trap features. We never take for granted the commitment we’ve made of offering a free version of TrapCall to everyone, but we were a little amazed at the overwhelming response, generating hundreds of thousands of signups in such a short amount of time. As we note in the signup process, the free Fly Trap account does have certain limitations, carrier voicemail being one of them. We’ve now realized that this fact was not clearly indicated on our site. For those of you who would still like carrier voicemail or visual voicemail support, we’ve tried to make the costs as absolutely minimal as possible, by pricing this feature at under 10 cents a day.

Please understand that we did not mean to pull the rug out from underneath you by making these changes to your voicemail so quickly. We failed to properly communicate that the changes would only effect a small portion of our users immediately. We’ve now realized we need to allow more time communicating changes to our users, and do it more transparently, which is why we now have a policy of emailing users at least 5 business days in advance of any important changes to your TrapCall plan, to avoid the “zero notice” feedback we received.

We also experienced some unexpected downtime on our toll-free number and our new voicemail access number shortly after these changes. Additionally, these issues occurred while some of our staff was on Passover holiday. We just couldn’t catch a break.

It’s very clear we have a lot of work to do to keep everything running smoothly and everybody happy. We’re focusing now on making our TrapCall beta more reliable for all of you, as we value you so much, and we’ll keep everyone updated as we make progress. Thank you so much for your continued support of TrapCall while we’re still in our beta stage!

Update: For more information on conditional call-forwarding and how TrapCall handles your voicemail, you can head over to the section on our FAQs page for more details.

You asked for it, you got it.

TrapCall now supports Verizon Wireless!

We worked hard, and as fast as possible, to learn all the ins and outs of Verizon Wireless so you can take advantage of everything TrapCall has to offer and never get a blocked call again.

So, Verizon Wireless users…enjoy!

Welcome to TrapCall. We’ve finally launched!!

And we have to say, in our opinion, its been worth the wait, we love what the team has built and we hope you do too!

We want to send out a special thanks to the talented TrapCall team, Matthew, Bryan and Mike, that worked day and night to make this site live.

Once again, thank you to everyone who has visited the site and supported us so far.

Get ready for the site to go ballistic!