How do I get a local phone number in another country so customers don't pay to call me?

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This is one of the simplest wins in international sales and one of the most overlooked. A customer who sees a long international prefix on your number, or who gets charged for calling it, often just doesn't call. A local number in their country removes that friction entirely, and it costs a few dollars a month, not a second office.

The setup is genuinely quick. The part that trips people up is caller ID and call-blocking rules, which vary a lot by country and aren't always obvious until you actually test a call.

What a virtual local number actually is

A virtual number is a real phone number with a local area code or country code that doesn't require you to have a physical line or office in that country. Calls to it route over the internet to wherever you actually answer, your phone, a team inbox, or a desk in a completely different country. KrispCall, like most VoIP providers, sells five kinds of these numbers: local, mobile, toll-free, vanity (a memorable custom number), and international. For a customer-facing support or sales line, a plain local number is almost always the right choice, toll-free and vanity numbers solve different problems (free-to-call and brand recall) at a higher price.

What it actually costs

On KrispCall's own published rates, a US or Canadian local number runs $4 a month, a UK local or mobile number also $4, and toll-free numbers in either region run $5 a month. That's the number itself; it sits on top of whichever user plan you're on (Starter at $15 a user a month, Advance at $40, Max at $60, all with 20% off if you pay annually). For other countries, the rate genuinely varies by how that country regulates virtual numbers, so get a current quote for your specific target country before you commit to anything, rather than assuming it'll match the US/UK rate.

Budget for the user seat too, not just the number. A single $4 number on top of a $15 Starter seat is roughly $19 a month all-in for one person handling that line, which is the honest number to compare against a mobile roaming plan or a local SIM. Texting customers without giving out your personal number uses the same kind of line.

A worked example: say you sell to buyers in the UK and Canada and currently route everything through one US number. Adding a UK local number and a Canadian local number costs $8 a month in number fees, plus whatever seat you're already paying for the person answering. Against the alternative, a UK SIM and a Canadian SIM you'd have to physically manage, or a roaming plan that bills per minute, $8 a month is close to free, and the numbers can both ring the same phone or team inbox you already use. The real decision isn't whether to add the number, it's whether your current team setup can actually answer a UK-hours call without someone being awake at 3am local time, which is a staffing question, not a phone-system one. Getting a UK or Canadian phone number when you live somewhere else covers that case in detail.

The caller ID problem nobody mentions upfront

This is the part that actually matters and rarely shows up in a vendor's sales pitch. Virtual numbers don't always display correctly to the person receiving the call, and in some countries the number can show up as blank, "unknown," or get flagged outright by carriers as suspicious. KrispCall's own documentation specifically calls out caller ID reliability as inconsistent in certain markets. Numbers showing up as "Scam Likely" is a genuine, widely known industry-wide problem with virtual and VoIP numbers generally, not something specific to KrispCall, though I couldn't find a dedicated KrispCall help-center article addressing it directly despite checking several likely categories. If a customer's phone shows "Scam Likely" instead of your business name, you've made the exact problem you were trying to solve worse: now they're even less likely to answer than they were for an international call.

This isn't unique to KrispCall. Any VoIP provider selling virtual numbers runs into the same carrier-level spam filtering, since it's the receiving country's mobile carriers, not the VoIP provider, that decide how to label an incoming number. A number that's brand new, makes a lot of outbound calls in a short window, or gets reported by even a few recipients can get flagged regardless of who sold it to you. The practical mitigation is boring but effective: register the number properly where the provider asks you to, don't blast outbound calls to a huge list the day you buy the number, and if you do get flagged, most providers have a dispute or re-registration process rather than the number being permanently burned.

The fix isn't complicated, but it's a step people skip: before you put a new international number anywhere public, place a real test call to a real phone in that country and look at what actually displays. Do this both ways, your outbound calls to local customers and their inbound calls to you. If the caller ID is broken or it's flagged, you'll want to know that before a customer does.

Step by step: how to set this up

1. Decide which countries actually need their own number. Don't buy a number for every country you've ever shipped to; buy one for the one or two markets where call volume or deal size justifies a few dollars a month and the setup time.
2. Compare virtual number types and rates for that specific country rather than assuming the US/UK pricing applies everywhere.
3. Check caller ID behavior for that country specifically before you commit, since this is the single most common thing that quietly undermines the whole point of the number.
4. Buy the number and route it to whoever on your team should actually answer, or to a shared queue if more than one person covers it. Answering phones after hours without hiring covers the time-zone gap.
5. Test calls both ways, a real inbound call from a phone in that country and a real outbound call to one, and only then put the number on your website, email signature or ads.

When a virtual number isn't the answer

If the honest problem is that you have one or two customers in a given country, not a market, a virtual number is overkill. Forwarding your existing number to your own mobile costs nothing beyond your carrier plan and solves the same problem for low volume. If customers are mostly comfortable messaging rather than calling, a free app like WhatsApp, where both sides already have the app, often removes the cost problem entirely without buying anything. I'd only reach for a dedicated virtual number through KrispCall once call volume from a specific country is real and recurring, not a one-off.

How I'd approach this

If you're expanding into a handful of markets and need numbers that actually route to the right person, team, or time zone automatically, with call data flowing into whatever CRM or dashboard you already use, that's a straightforward custom build on top of a VoIP provider's API rather than something you manage by hand number by number. I build that kind of connective layer for clients who've outgrown doing this manually, and if you've already got a half-finished setup from a previous attempt, picking it up and finishing it properly is usually faster than starting from zero.