YourBusinessNumber Review

How we rated YourBusinessNumber

What a phone number is bought for here is a single line that has to stay verifiable inside somebody else’s app, so the questions a reader brings to it are the ones a contract raises rather than a feature list: what arrives, how quickly, what it costs each month, and what happens to the number if a service turns it away. The company publishes its answers on the homepage, at the checkout and in a separate terms document. No line was generated by us for this piece, so what follows is a reading of that published material rather than a report from a number of our own. Every source behind it is set out at the end of the piece with the date each was checked.

Getting set up

The flow is three steps and it is documented as one. A number is generated on the website, WhatsApp Business is downloaded from the App Store or Google Play, and the app is pointed at the new number when it asks for one. The company states that the number reaches the phone by SMS in about ten seconds, and the checkout collects the buyer’s own mobile number and a preferred area code before the payment step rather than after it, so the number is shown before anything is charged.

Two details at that checkout decide what arrives. The first is the area code, which the buyer picks from the options the site offers rather than being assigned. The second is the industry, which sits on the same screen and steers the choice. What the pages do not say is how deep the pool behind a given code runs, so a buyer with one code in mind has no way of knowing in advance whether it is free.

4.5 for a loop the company documents from end to end, with a delivery time stated in seconds and the number shown before payment is taken.

Cost and value

The rate is £6.99 plus VAT a month, with no minimum term and nothing to cancel beyond the subscription itself, and the checkout totals it at £8.39 for a UK buyer. That is the figure to hold against the alternative of another SIM on a contract of its own, and it is where the product is easiest to justify: a sole trader pays roughly the price of a coffee a week for a number that keeps work messages out of a personal inbox.

The same monthly shape holds in most of the other markets the site quotes, at $8.99 in the United States, CA $10.00 in Canada and R$28 in Brazil, each of them carrying the same no-contract line. Australia is the exception, priced at $9.99 a month with a three-month minimum written beside it. Two products sit outside the rate as well. The Teams option, which puts several numbers under one dashboard and one subscription, is sold without a published price, so the cost of a small rollout is quoted on request. The travel eSIM sold on the same site is a separate purchase again, a data plan for a trip rather than a number, and it is not included.

4.5 for a monthly price that undercuts the line it replaces and carries no term in the home market, held from the top because the rate is quoted before VAT, one market attaches a minimum, and the multi-number tier has no rate to compare against.

Number choice

What arrives is a standard UK mobile number, the type WhatsApp Business recognises, so the choice is over the code rather than the country. The limits are set out on the homepage rather than left to be discovered: the number works inside messaging apps, the line on the SIM card handles ordinary calls and texts, and a call placed to the virtual number is forwarded to the mobile the account was opened with at no extra charge. A buyer who wants to ring out from the number, or to collect a text on it outside those apps, is not the buyer this product was built for.

The scope is narrower still. The company states that it currently supports customers looking for a virtual number to get verified on WhatsApp Business, which makes this a single-purpose line rather than a general second number. Numbers are also reused by carriers, as they are across the industry, so one can arrive carrying a history that a service has already turned away. That is the risk the terms address, and it is the one to price in before paying.

4.3 for a number type that does the job it is sold for and a code the buyer chooses, scored below the two sections above it because the line is scoped to one app and a reused number can arrive already blocked.

Support

Support runs through the same number the company uses for everything else, a WhatsApp chat line, backed by a help page and the questions answered on the site. For a product whose failure mode is a number a service will not accept, that is the right channel, because the person asking has a phone in hand and a code that has not arrived. The pages offer somewhere to go when the code is late, and the company’s own FAQ sets out the cases where it lands somewhere other than the handset.

The commitment worth checking is in the terms rather than in the marketing. Numbers are standard UK mobiles and carriers reuse them, so the terms state what happens when one has been blocked by a third-party service: support will swap the number once. It is a single swap rather than an open-ended replacement, and nothing published sets a response time, so a business that leans on the number should treat the first block as the moment to check the arrangement still works for it.

4.2 for a published route to a person and a written swap commitment where most resellers say nothing at all, held back because the swap is one and only one.

Terms and data

The contract is short and mostly standard, and three of its clauses touch a buying decision. Liability is capped at the total fees payable under the contract, which is the usual shape for a service of this size, and time is expressly not of the essence, which means a late delivery is not by itself a breach. Below that sit the ordinary grounds for ending an agreement, a material breach, non-payment or insolvency, and a force majeure clause that lets either side cancel if a disruption runs past ninety days.

The clause the product makes necessary is the one about messages. All numbers are standard UK mobile numbers, and the terms state that no warranty is given as to whether any third-party service will send a message to one. Carriers recycle their ranges, and the remedy on offer when another company refuses to deliver to one is the single swap described above. Payments are taken in British pounds unless agreed otherwise, and disputes are governed by the law of England and Wales.

On data, the contract takes the split the law expects when one business handles information for another: the customer is the controller and the provider is the processor, with co-controller status reserved for the material the law requires to be kept. The privacy policy, last updated in November 2024, places text-messaging opt-in data and consent outside the categories it shares, and then names the platform providers, phone companies and other vendors that help deliver messages as recipients of that opt-in status. Both statements sit on the same page, and a buyer reading for what happens to their own number should read them together.

4.1 for paperwork that is short, clear about what it will not warrant and explicit about who holds what, scored where it is because the swap commitment is spent in one go and the data wording pays to be read twice.

Who YourBusinessNumber is for

The buyer this suits is a UK sole trader or small business that has been running work conversations through a personal WhatsApp and wants them somewhere else. A second handset solves the same problem for several times the monthly cost, and the case is strongest where the work is messaging first: estate agents, consultants, trades, trainers and therapists, the categories the site itself names.

The buyer it does not suit is one who needs an ordinary phone service. Nothing on the number sends or receives a text outside the apps, and a call to it is forwarded rather than answered there, so a business that prints the number as its main contact is printing a forwarding address. A team that needs several numbers should look at the Teams option, though its rate is quoted rather than published, and a traveller shopping for data abroad is in the market for the eSIM instead.