A look back at 16 years of TextNow

Today is a milestone day for us, because today we officially turn 16 years old. Fun fact: Did you know that we've been around the same amount of time as some of your other trusted apps, like Pinterest, WhatsApp, and Square?

If you're new here, welcome! If you've been along for the ride for a while now, we want to start off by thanking you for allowing us to continue on our mission of making phone service free, easy, and accessible.

You see, while many other service companies like to stick to “what works,” we’re constantly working on figuring out “what works better,” and more importantly – “free-er.”  It's what keeps us so young.

But before we get too far ahead into where we’re growing as a company, we want to take this moment to reflect on how far we’ve come in the 16 years we've been in business. There are a lot of accomplishments to celebrate in that time, thanks to not only our employees but our dedicated customers. Consider this our “Sweet 16” celebration: an inside look into the machine that is TextNow.  

197 

Starting off with our humblest statistic, that is the number of employees that we currently have (and growing!) We're a small but mighty team, and we’re lucky to have people in our company that all share the same passion for the mission, making all that we do that much easier and smoother.   

$1.6mil

This is how much we’ve saved people on their phone bill since we introduced our free nationwide phone service in 2020¹. We’ll let that sink in.  

Over 300mil

Downloads. Since we first went up on the App Store, we’ve had over 300 million downloads –whether it’s for your regular phone service, as a dedicated number for your business, or just a local number you use over Wi-Fi in lieu of data service. We salute all who gave us a try (and their money-savvy mindset!) 

$800mil

For the business-curious people out there, over the past 16 years, we’ve made $800mil in revenue (not to toot our own horn, but toot toot!) The impressive part here is that we did it with only $1.5mil in seed funding. We like to bring up money saving, because it's not just what we provide, it's truly in our DNA.

Over 28 billion

Text messages sent! That’s enough for every single person in the world to send 3 messages. Quick – if you could only send out 3 texts, what would they be?  

We've achieved some big numbers over the course of our young 16 years, and we couldn’t be more excited to see what we accomplish in the next 16 – my personal favorite? Watching just how much we can save hard-working Americans month over month, year over year. Keep following along for more exciting updates!

If you have any questions or comments (or want to send us a birthday message), send us a note at [email protected]! 

¹ Based on the average monthly cost of phone service in the U.S, as reported by J.D Power in 2024.