I built Yapdial because I couldn't afford a phone.

I remember counting out coins for a phone top-up more than once, enough for maybe four or five minutes, and rehearsing what I'd say before I even dialed, because every second on the call was a second closer to running out of credit. A phone contract wasn't happening. International rates were even worse. So calls got shorter, rarer, and eventually a lot of people I cared about just became someone I texted instead of someone I talked to.

What made it sting was that the actual cost of connecting a call is basically nothing. The expense was always the phone company sitting in the middle: a SIM you had to buy, a plan you had to commit to, a per-minute international rate that seemed to exist purely to punish you for having family somewhere else. None of that had anything to do with whether you could afford to say hello to your mum.

So Yapdial is the thing I wish existed back then: open a browser tab, type a number, talk. No SIM to buy, no contract to sign, no phone to save up for at all. Just a laptop, a library computer, a borrowed tablet, whatever you've got. Top up a couple of dollars when you have it, and let it sit there until you need it again. No subscription quietly draining money you don't have.

It's a small thing next to everything else that's hard about not having money. But a phone call to someone you miss shouldn't be one of the things you have to give up, and if Yapdial means one more person gets to make that call instead of putting it off, that's the whole point of building it.