About
Hello everyone O/, as of now Skype has shut down. I found about skype news in end of March.
# problem
Skype is shutting down. I use skype a lot or used to do now. I need to make international or local calls to the country I am visiting when I travel, it can be from hospital calls to sometimes verification calls.
As soon as I find out skype is shutting down I decided to built a simple alternative for calls.
# Solution https://voixcall.com/
I built a simple platform. You can make calls from your browser. It's prepaid like service. Purchase a 5$ credit and use it to make calls. No subscription. the credits never expires. You can find out exactly how much it will cost right before you make a call.
# Development challenges and regulations hurdle in my country
The development challenge were not so bad tbh. I made the backend in golang with postgresql DB and frontend in react+vite , while the site main-frontend is in Astro. app is in react.
The development took less time lol. I don't have access to stripe in my country(India). So I had to go through a longer route to accept payments. We have Razorpay payment gateway that is good for local business, but to get that you need business registartion, that took some time like 10 days.
Once I got the payment gateway, there was another regulation for international payments acceptance. I had to get some import/export code license and then apply for international payment acceptance.
This whole process took 25 days roughly. I will be honest if you have access to stripe, you are blessed.
# Tech Stack
* backend : golang with GIN and postgresql
* frontend app : react + vite + zustand
* site/marketing app : Astro
* Payments : Razorpay.
# deployment
* my deployment is distributed i.e. I am not using single service for now.
* Backend is on render.com
* frontend is on netlify.com
* DB is on neon.tech DB
* cloudflare for captcha
* Umami for stats : umami.is
* Resend for emails
* I do plan to switch to a single VPS server later on though.
# challenge
This kind of free deployment bring a certain challenge of latency. I have done some optimizations specially on database querys and used pl/pgsql. I also had a race condition because of latencies which I fixed later.
AMA !! , happy to answer and if you have use case please try on https://voixcall.com