Saily, the eSIM service owned by NordVPN, now offers a dedicated US phone number for $1 a month. Vykintas Maknickas, the company’s CEO, says it was designed to be a secondary active number that you can use to receive two-factor authentication codes while traveling abroad or for anything you don’t want to use your actual number for. You can, for instance, use your Saily number for account registrations and parcel deliveries, to get into US-only services and to open a second WhatsApp profile that you hopefully won’t be using for anything illegal.

The company says the number you pay for is fully functional. You can send and receive texts with it, and use it to make or receive calls. As long as you keep your subscription active, you’ll keep the same digits and be able to receive texts from anywhere in the world. However, to send texts and make and receive calls, you will have to purchase a separate plan, on top of the subscription fee, and it will not include Saily’s data offerings. Those plans start at $1, and take note that the minutes you get apply to both incoming and outgoing calls. 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that you can only make calls to local numbers within the coverage area of your active plan, whether that’s a country or a whole region. So if you paid for the European service, you’ll only be able to make outgoing calls within the 35 countries it covers. That said, you can receive calls from anybody, even someone outside your active region or country. 

Of course, since Saily is primarily a data provider, using it means you don’t have to pay roaming fees. You just have to install the eSIM and buy data plans that work for where you’re going. If you want to compare first before you decide, Airalo also offers data and a subscription service that will give you a phone number for several countries around the world and not just the US.