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Dialpad Woes

I've been using and paying for Dialpad for years.

I moved to Dialpad after Google Voice decided to screw me over by dropping my Google Voice number arbitarily. You see I used to use Google Voice as my consistent number so that I would never lose my GV number. Until they just up and removed it from me.

So I decided to pay for voip from Dialpad. I also moved to voip through Dialpad because I moved to Japan and wanted to keep my US phone numbers.

The problems though over years of using Dialpad are the following:

• Dialpad effectively killed my ability to send personal text messages. Because my account is classified as a business account, they require A2P registration and a mountain of compliance paperwork. My company has never sent marketing texts. I just occasionally text friends and family. Their solution would require forms, approvals, and even opt-out language for personal conversations. That's absurd.
• It's expensive for something that I basically only use for personal texts and 2-factor. I asked for cheaper plans. There are none. If you want a cheap number for texting and 2-factor primarily, dialpad ain't it.
• Their phone app sucks for scrolling back to look at old messages. You can't go back by date or go up quickly. You have to slowly scroll up. And by the way, there is no local caching of old messages on your phone, so everytime you want to try to look at old messages you are basically stuck spending half an hour scrolling up slowly. It's total garbage.
• They don't permanently store mms data for you. This would be fine if the app stored it locally on your phone once viewed but it doesn't. So old mms data? Poof. Gone eventually.
• You can't convert back to monthly billing after converting to annual without begging them to allow it. I tried. I had to go through several rounds of support. Then wait about 2 weeks. Finally they asked me if I would still like to convert to monthly billing. Two weeks of effort to do so is NOT acceptable.
• They don't warn you AT ALL before charging you your new year renewal payment. Which is the norm sure with many services, but I really prefer the ones that tell me a bit in advance of the renewal that they are soon to hit me with a big bill.

Most of these issues were fairly tolerable. When I had money to waste on this shit. I don't any more, so I decided to get t.f. off their service.

Only thing is that I wanted a permanent record of my texts, calls, contacts, MMSes, etc. They offer no way to do this without paying the extremely expensive corporate plan. I asked. Not provided. No such feature. No way to checkout or download all your data.

So finally enough was enough. I used Cursor and had it write a headless browser automation script to yoink all my data from their shitacular UI. Less than two hours after beginning my project, I have complete code to do it and pulled down all my data using it.

Fuck you Dialpad. I got everything I needed. You aren't getting more money from me. AND I'm going to post all my code to assist anyone else who wants to get t.f. off your shitty service.