Why Filantis
The system your business runs on should hold no surprises
It rings when a customer calls, or the business stops. So the things worth judging us on are dull ones: what the bill does when you hire, whose hardware your recordings sit on, what happens when an update goes wrong, and whether you can leave. Here are our answers, including the ones that are not flattering.
Six things we will not do
Everything below this is the evidence for them.
The bill is the same whether ten people or ninety use the system. Growth costs nothing until you genuinely need more calls at once.
There is no overage on this product. Reach the simultaneous-call ceiling and the next call waits — you are never charged for a busy Tuesday.
We are not a reseller of minutes. You bring your own SIP trunk from whichever carrier you like, and change it without changing us.
Features your plan excludes stay visible in the interface with a padlock, naming the cheapest plan that includes them and its price.
No notice period, no cancellation fee, and 7 days to change your mind about a first payment. Your numbers were never ours to hold.
Your calls, recordings and contacts are yours. Not for advertising, not to build products with, and not to train models on.
What it is built on
Filantis is a complete, maintained product around Asterisk — the telephony engine behind a large share of the world's business phone systems, in continuous development since 1999. We did not invent a protocol, and nothing here depends on one only we speak.
Separated per organisation
On the hosted platform every customer gets their own tables, their own SIP realm and their own credentials — not a shared table with a customer column that one missed condition turns into somebody else's call history.
Encrypted where it counts
HTTPS for the interface, TLS with encrypted audio for the mobile app, and stored connector credentials sealed rather than sitting in a column in plain text. Phone passwords are stored as digests and cannot be read back, by us or by anybody.
Filtered by default
Every edition ships with a firewall and with automatic blocking of the hosts that hammer a phone system all day looking for a weak password. Both are editable from the interface, and both are on before you get there.
Updates that can be undone
Releases are cryptographically signed and verified against a key already on the machine, so the update server can withhold an update but cannot forge one. A database snapshot is taken before anything changes.
Two firmware slots on the appliance
An appliance installs new firmware to the slot it is not running from, and returns to the version that worked if the new one does not boot. Nobody has to drive out to a comms cabinet with a keyboard.
Standard SIP throughout
Standard handsets, standard trunks, standard codecs. No proprietary protocol deciding which phones you may buy or who you may buy minutes from — which is what makes "you can leave" a fact rather than a slogan.
The promise you can check right now
This website does not track you
No analytics script, no advertising pixel, no beacon, and no cookie set to follow you. There is no consent banner on this site because there is nothing to consent to. Open your browser's network tab and look — that is the point of saying it here rather than in a policy.
We do count page views, on our own server, because a business that cannot tell whether anybody read its pricing page is guessing. What is recorded is the page, the day and a hash of your address — under a key that is thrown away daily, so two visits an hour apart are known to be one person and two visits a week apart are not. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control are honoured.
Inside the product, the same rule
- Your call data is yours. Not used for advertising, not used to build products, not used to train models.
- Recordings stay where the edition puts them — on your own disk on the appliance and office server, on the platform in the cloud, and nowhere else in either case.
- Connectors only reach what you connect. Nothing is sent to a cloud service you have not configured with your own account.
- The mobile app asks for what it needs and says why — microphone, camera, notifications — and it does not read the phone's contacts unless you switch that on.
- Deleting is deleting. A closed workspace's data is removed, not archived quietly for later.
The parts that are not flattering
Every one of these is in the terms or the refund policy already. They are here because you should not have to find them there.
We work to keep the hosted platform running continuously and we watch it — but we would rather say this than publish a number we have not committed to underwriting. A dedicated cloud instance or an enterprise agreement can include one; ask.
An extension can be at a desk, at home, or on a mobile in another country, so an emergency operator may receive no location or the wrong one — and some trunk providers do not carry emergency calls at all. Every workplace should keep another way to call for help that does not depend on the office network.
The machine is reserved for you the moment it is created, so there is nothing to give back. Try a shared plan first — that is exactly what it is for.
For every plan including the free one, at hello@filantis.com. We aim to reply within one working day, and faster when phones are down. There is no telephone support desk, and pretending otherwise would waste your time at the moment you least have it.
That is why the product is built on standard protocols you could take elsewhere, why your numbers stay with your own carrier, and why the owned editions exist. The question "what if they disappear" deserves an answer better than reassurance.
Questions about the product
Billing and subscription questions are answered on the pricing page.
Will my existing handsets work?
If they speak SIP — Yealink, Grandstream, Fanvil, Snom, Cisco and most others — yes, including the lamp keys, transfer and pickup. There is no proprietary protocol, so you are never locked to one make of phone.
Can we keep our numbers and our carrier?
Yes, and you should. Filantis connects to any standard SIP trunk provider, so you keep the numbers you have and the contract you have — or move to a cheaper carrier later without touching the phone system.
What happens if our internet goes down?
On the hosted platform, calls stop until it comes back, like every cloud phone system — although you can forward the main number at the carrier so callers reach a mobile. On an appliance or office server, internal calls between desks carry on working, because the system is in the building with them.
Do you need access to our system?
On the hosted platform we operate the machine, so yes in the sense that any hosting provider does. On an appliance or your own server, no: the unit reports what version it runs so we can tell you an update exists, and it installs nothing by itself. Support access is something you grant, not something we hold.
How long does it take to set up?
A cloud workspace exists in about two minutes and can be taking calls the same afternoon: add your people, point a SIP trunk at it, and register the phones. The long pole is almost always the carrier, not us.
Is it suitable for a call centre?
For an outbound team, yes — the autodialer, the reports and the wallboards are built for exactly that, and the premium plan carries 24 simultaneous calls. For a large inbound contact centre with strict queue targets, be honest with us about the numbers first and we will tell you whether it fits.
The best way to judge it is to run it
The free plan is a complete phone system rather than a countdown, so you can answer every question on this page yourself, with your own numbers and your own staff, before you pay anything.
A free plan, not a trial 7 days to change your mind on a first payment Cancel any time, no notice period