When someone loses a fixed address, they often lose their phone number too — and the caseworkers, employers, and family trying to reach them can't. SteadyPhone gives clients a number and voicemail box that stays with them, no matter where they're sleeping this week.
A P.O. box for someone's voice.
SteadyPhone gives a client a phone number and voicemail box that's independent of any fixed address, cellular plan, or specific device. It runs entirely over WiFi — the browser is the phone.
SteadyPhone is a modern rebuild of a model that already worked once: Community Voice Mail, which — starting in 1991 — gave homeless and low-income people a personal number and voicemail box through partner shelters and agencies. SteadyPhone keeps what worked — an agency-vouched, dignity-first number that doesn't reveal anything about the holder's situation — and adds what wasn't possible then: real two-way calling from a browser, not just a message left in a box.
Clients without a reliable way to be reached are clients you lose touch with at the worst possible moment.
SteadyPhone runs independently. Enrolling a client just needs your referral and vouching — nothing to install or maintain.
Nothing about the number itself identifies someone as a client of your program.
Designed specifically for people without stable cellular service, ID, or a fixed address — where most existing phone options fail.
Three documents that go further than this page — how the numbers work for your agency, why any of this matters in the first place, and what actually changed with the subsidy programs everyone remembers.
The full pricing and mechanics of becoming a vouching sponsor: the $500 buy-in, under-80-cents-an-hour outgoing calls, what stays free forever, optional rate limits, and how clients can top up their own minutes.
Read the sponsor program →A sourced, long-form look at what losing a phone number actually costs — for the client, and for every caseworker, employer, clinic, and family member trying to reach them. Includes the full research behind Community Voice Mail's track record.
Read the full case →The free-phone program everyone remembers ended in 2024. What's new is that the backup program has been quietly narrowing ever since — and why none of it touches what SteadyPhone does.
Read the subsidy gap →SteadyPhone is in active development, built on the same technology already powering DataPublisher's DP Phone product line. This isn't a finished product we're asking you to adopt today — we're looking for a small number of Western Pennsylvania agencies willing to help shape the pilot: what a real intake process should look like, what your clients actually need, and where to launch first.
If this sounds like something your clients could use — or you'd just like to compare notes on what's already out there for this population — we'd like to hear from you.