HOW to search for numbers?
Large companies are good at providing the service but they have to be everything to everyone, and it takes more effort and specialized tools and marketing experience, to find really good numbers today. When there were plenty of numbers available you could just ask for and get whatever number you needed. Fast forward 20+ years and 40+ million customers later and just like domain names, you can’t expect to get an obvious generic toll free number. You won’t get your first choice today, which means you have to be more creative and more thorough to be sure you’ve found the best available number than you did when your first or second choice was available.
Start with the Lookup tool on the top of the page
The main feature of our website and service is the Toll Free Search Engine on the top of the page at VanityNumbers.com. Start by entering a word or phrase and it’ll show you the exact match if it’s more than 7 digits. It’ll show a few available numbers that contain it if it’s less than 7 digits and there are any. Then below that you’ll see any related options available by adding additional words or numbers. You’ll have to scroll through the options, but you’ll see numbers in Disconnect and Available, possibly some True800 #s, and Premium #s too.
In Use means NOT Available
There’s a section on how to Dig Deeper when the number you want isn’t available, but just know that it’s not available and it’s EXTREMELY difficult to get a number that’s NOT Available. I like to say it’s kind of like asking out a married person. It’s a real long shot at best. And there’s a whole section called Marketing that covers WHAT to search for, so we won’t go into that here. This section is about HOW to search for a number.
Numbers in disconnect are coming soon. They’re not available right now but will be soon and if you backorder it we’ll wait and try to grab it for you the second it comes out! They take more time and effort so they’re more than the available numbers that are $49 and available right away. Numbers in disconnect are also not guaranteed until they come out and we get them for you and you ONLY pay for it if we’re able to get it for you.
Use Shorter Keywords and Longer Phrases
Don’t limit yourself to 7 digits. Think in terms of a keyword and let the computer combine it with all the related terms. Even your company initials, anything as long as it’s at least 3 digits or more. Putting in the letters instead of the numbers allows the computer to relate it better to more words or phrases.
Extra digits
Anything after 7 digits is ignored. You can put anything you want after that to make it easier to remember but they really don’t count or matter. Just like the R in 800-MARKETER. It’s just there to make it easier to remember. You can put anything after the first 7 digits you want or need to, to make it memorable. You might lose an occasional user that doesn’t get through and doesn’t see what the issue is, but you’ll lose a lot more by not having the right message in your number than you will having it more than 7 digits.
There are 7 toll free area codes
800, 888, 877, 866, 855, 844 and 833. They are all toll free and all work exactly the same from a technical standpoint. The only difference is the public’s recognition and impression. An 800 number is harder to get and gives more credibility, and a big company image. If it was just as easy to get an 800 as any of the others it probably wouldn’t give any more credibility. The newer area codes work fine but look newer.
People often ask if it’s more important to have an ‘800’ or to have the right words. Overall I think the message usually is the first priority, but I always say be creative because there are a lot of other options too. If you’re a new high tech start up or using a number with your name in it, the newer or more personal image works fine. If you’re trying to look like a Fortune 500 company, it’s probably more worth the extra to get the credibility of an “800”. It depends on how important that credibility is to your sales process. There’s no one answer for everyone. Most people are somewhere in between. We all know what we want but often have to take what we can get too.
Two things to Avoid
The first is the FREE toll free number trap. As the saying goes there is no FREE lunch and that’s very true here too. There are companies that claim to give you a toll free number for free with their web hosting or virtual office phone system. Then after you’ve advertised it and printed it on all your labels and your customers are used to using it, you find out that you can cancel the service but you can’t take THEIR toll free number with you if you want to go somewhere else.
Even if they’re not holding you hostage as bad as that, they’re not giving you the toll free number out of the goodness of their heart, they’re giving it to you to sell you the service that they get a commission on. So they may sound cheaper or even free, but they’re not. It doesn’t take very many months of their service to add up to more than the cost to OWN it with no strings.
Be careful where you SEARCH
Most other websites are watching you and will automatically reserve whatever number you find that was available, so you have to get it from them. It’s very underhanded and a big red flag to avoid that company. You may be able to wait until it drops off of reserve but that can be up to six weeks. If this happens to you, contact us and we’ll try to watch and get it for you.
Warning: Searching for #s on other websites may attract the phone number sharks!
Two kinds of vanity number lookups
There’s two kinds of lookups, one just checks a specific number, and answers yes or no if it’s available. The other shows anything that matches exactly, but also checks and shows lots of related numbers to try and find something good for the customer even if the one they looked up isn’t available.
It’s easy to just check a single number. It takes a lot of information and knowledge of vanity numbers to make suggestions and find good numbers for customers when the exact number they lookup isn’t available. But doing a better job, going that extra mile, to help customers get better numbers is what we’re all about.
When there were tons of great numbers available all you had to do was lookup that specific number and everyone was happy. Unfortunately your first choice is almost never available any more. That’s why you have to be much more thorough and creative to find any good numbers today, and it’s getting harder to find great numbers. That’s why our lookup tool checks thousands of options every time someone enters a single number.
It’s much easier to review a thorough list of options than it is to think up and try hundreds or thousands of numbers. It would take hours or even days to check as many numbers as we do in just a few seconds. We also sort them by their value which you couldn’t even do manually to make them easier to review with just a glance. We’ve spent years developing this more creative and thorough tool and give it to you for free through our website because we want to help you find the best possible number for your business!
Search every 800 number vendor in one place
You can look things up at any of the 800 number vendors out there. They’ll all have a limited pool of numbers for sale, and most of them will automatically reserve anything from the spare pool and use that to lock you into their expensive service. You can’t tell which vendors are legit and you’ll get a lot of high pressure salespeople pushing their numbers.
Or you can look things up on our site, which isn’t monitored and shows you the numbers from EVERY reputable vendor in one place. We don’t automatically reserve numbers and we’re the only ones not trying to sell you our service and keep you here. Nobody else shows anywhere near as many numbers, gives as much information, or helps you get numbers from anyone else like we do.
Not only is our lookup tool faster, better and smarter, but I’m here to help you, as a toll free consultant, not to sell you and lock you into our service, like literally every other site or vendor. I’ve done this for 29 years and helped more customers find great numbers than anyone else for a reason. Use our lookup tool to search the entire toll free world and let me know via chat, phone or email, any questions and a little of the concept you’re looking for. I’ll be your toll free consultant, helping you find the truly best possible, most memorable numbers for your business.
Don’t you have a list of the available numbers?
We are the Internet’s toll free number search engine, but people sometimes ask if there’s a simple list of all the available numbers or maybe all the “GOOD” numbers as if there was some secret shortcut. Everyone likes easy and I guess it’s natural to look for a shortcut. If you were shopping for a used car, you could go to a car dealer, that’s just showing you the cars they have on their lot. They can give you a list, so how come a car search engine can’t? Well, a car search engine DOES give you a list. They give you a list every time you search, but it’s not just random, they give you a list RELATED to what you search for.
As the Internet’s Toll Free Search Engine, we are searching tens of millions of possible toll free numbers. For local numbers we’re searching over two billion possible local numbers, to give you a list of the most relevant options, related to what you entered. The whole purpose of our site is to “give you a list” but it’s not a list of just our numbers, it’s a list based on ALL the possible numbers. There’s nobody with more information, or more numbers. They may have a few on their lot, that aren’t showing as available, but nobody has anywhere near as many numbers and provides lists for visitors the way we do.
Beat on the lookup tool on the top of the page at VanityNumbers.com and play with the filters for the Related options to narrow them down, based on your preferences. We’ve worked for years to make this amazingly easy and fast to find the best options related to your business. And let us know if you have any questions. We’re the biggest number geeks and we’re happy to help you find the best, most memorable vanity numbers for your business!
What does your number spell?
Our search results show what any 7 digit number spells. I started a big data push right before the pandemic and have been working on it in a variety of ways and this is the most visible part of it. Just type in any number in the lookup tool on the top of the page at VanityNumbers.com and it’ll show you what it spells.
There are other tools out there, but none as thorough, or as smart. They are usually made by programmers with very little knowledge of the vanity number business, just taking a dictionary and looking for anything in the dictionary anywhere in the number. We tried using a dictionary as a doublecheck but had to discard the idea because almost 75% of the things we search for aren’t in a dictionary. Other tools also don’t know the importance or value of the words a number spells. The goal isn’t really to throw more mud up against the wall, but to KNOW for every 7 digit number what the most valuable thing it spells is.
If you enter digits our lookup will show you the most valuable term right in the title along with the digits. This sounds simple but requires a lot of data, experience and knowledge within the vanity number business to do this. We also have a bulk spell checker, that you can enter a list of phone numbers and see the best vanity terms for each of those numbers sorted by value.
There are always more fish in the sea
I don’t care how sure you are, how much you believe that your situation is different, or how positive you are that’s the ONLY number that would work for you, that’s still not true. Unless you need it because it was printed by accident on a big mailing that already went out in the mail, there are ALWAYS other alternatives. And unless you have spent significant time racking your brain and using our lookup tool going through the alternatives, you simply can’t say that’s the “perfect” number or the only number, or even the best number for your business.
Don’t decide up front that one number is perfect and focus exclusively on that one number. This is an important decision and it’s worth taking a little time to delve into it. You don’t decide who to hire before talking to a lot of people. You shouldn’t decide who to marry up front. You never get the best results on an important decision by deciding on one option before you explore and consider all the options. It’s easy to get blinded by your first idea, and it would be nice if we could all get the perfect number. But it’s not 1993 any more. It’s a lot harder to get good numbers than it ever was before.
We make it easier than anyone else to explore tons of alternatives. Do a few searches and go through all the hundreds of alternatives that our lookup tool finds for you. It’s extremely thorough and creative and shows ways to use any term in phrases and a boat load of related terms too. This creativity is invaluable in coming up with a good number today. It’s extremely difficult to get good numbers today and the lookup tool checks thousands and thousands of options for every search to give you so many good options. All you have to do is look through them and pick out a couple that show promise.
Let our super thorough and creative vanity number lookup tool show you all the other fish in the sea!
This number says it’s “IN USE.” Can you help me with it?
Yes and no. No, we can’t make someone else sell you their house, no matter how perfect it would be for you. But we can help you find all the best available numbers. If you define success only as getting that one perfect number that isn’t available, you’re setting yourself up for failure. We do show a lot of numbers as Requestable (in BLUE with a link to a Request Form). We also have more information on how YOU can dig deeper for an 800 number than anyone else but if a number says IN USE, we can’t request it for you. There really are no phone number bounty hunters.
We can help you more than anyone, by being more creative and thorough, and coming up with hundreds of related options. When you have to give bad news to someone, it’s always easier if you give them a handful of good alternatives. Our system gives you hundreds, but pick out the top 3-4 options and include that to your boss, if you can’t get the one he or she really wants. If you want to look even better copy our whole list of alternatives to show how much research you did AND include just the top handful to make it easier for them to pick one of the available options rather than dreaming up the next most perfect number for you to chase!
Numbers that can’t exist
911 is not valid in any area code
911 is obviously reserved for emergency response and it makes sense to not allow that in any area code to avoid confusion. Think about why you wanted it, to play off of the awareness of “911” so to avoid confusion as much as possible they don’t allow it anywhere.
You can however put it after a word. It just can’t start with 911. One of the first numbers I got before I even got into this business was 1-800 RESUME-911. So you can still use it, if you’re creative.
555 is not valid
Despite what you’ve seen in movies, 555 is not a valid exchange in any local or toll free area code in North America, EXCEPT for “800”.
It’s a funny story why it’s only available in 800-555-****. You have to understand the early history of toll free a little. AT&T invented toll free numbers in 1967 when they were THE phone company. When their long distance was broken up and other companies started offering long distance they just gave them out by exchange (blocks of 10K #s) to different phone companies, just like they did local numbers.
A Canadian phone company requested the 555 exchange. At first AT&T said no, because that’s not a valid exchange for us. The Canadian company said it’s not for you but we can use it. Eventually they got the 555 exchange and were giving them out to Canadian customers, when they created the SMS/800 database to make numbers portable and issue numbers individually. They were grandfathered in, and after a period of time were able to be transferred and used the same as any other number.
They are obviously very hard to get and valuable because they’re so unique. They decided not to allow them though when they added 888’s in 1996, and have blocked both 555 and 911 in every new toll free area code introduction.
Phone numbers can’t start with a zero or a one
Phone numbers can’t start with a Zero or a One. Not toll free numbers, and not local numbers either. If you write out (201) 123-4567 you kind of realize it looks funny. 1 and 0 were set aside from the first phone number system, to represent Long Distance and Operator assisted calls, respectively.
Unavailable 800 exchanges
The following 12 exchanges aren’t available in the 800 area code.
271; 389; 415; 534; 623; 703; 740; 744; 751; 855; 904; 907
There are a dozen exchanges in the ‘800’ area code that are ‘set aside’ and not available. In the beginning of toll free numbers, AT&T was the only long distance company and toll free numbers were only available through them. But shortly after AT&T was broken up in 1984, in 1986 other companies began to be allowed to offer toll free service. They did this the same way that they allowed other companies to offer local numbers, by allocating exchanges to different phone companies.
In 1993 with the creation of the SMS800 database, individual numbers became ‘portable’ and could be assigned and transferred between phone companies. However, several ‘800’ exchanges had already been assigned to the phone companies in the Caribbean. All together 12 exchanges were set aside for use in those countries and then later, closed.
800-389 for the Bahamas
800-534 for Barbados
800-623 for Bermuda
800-415, 800-751, and 800-907 for the Dominican Republic
800-271 for Trinidad
800-855 is reserved for services for deaf or hearing-impaired users; these TTY-related numbers, operated by individual telephone companies, are assigned directly by the North American Numbering Plan Administrator (NANPA)
Several other prefixes, including 800-703, 800-744, and 800-904 are reserved by the FCC.
911 was also set aside in EVERY area code and 555 was set aside in every toll free area code except 800. 800-555 was used in Canada before the Canadian and US systems were merged to form the SMS/800 and those customers didn’t want to give those number up so it was allowed, making it the only area code in the North American Numbering Plan that allows 555.
With 7 toll free area codes that means an additional 13 exchanges that aren’t available. So there are 25 exchanges all together that aren’t available.