E-Residency Sold You "Run a Company From a Laptop". Here Are the 10 Calls You'll Still Have to Place

I signed up as an Estonian e-resident in 2018. The official site told me I could start, run and grow a company 100% online, and in the marketing sense that was true enough. I never had to set foot in Tallinn (well, at least at the beginning of it, but more of that below). I signed everything with my e-Residency card. I filed paperwork from a desk in Tokyo. There are now more than 135,000 e-residents who have founded over 38,500 companies, and most of us signed up on roughly the same promise.

What the marketing did not mention is that "100% online" is true for the paperwork. The operational glue around the paperwork still leaks into the phone network. Most of the time it leaks outbound, and most of the time you are the one dialling.

This is not a complaint about e-Residency. The programme does what it says on the tin, and I would sign up for it again tomorrow. But if you are about to apply, or are a year in and wondering why your monthly phone bill is suddenly a line item, this is the part that does not go in the brochure.

I’ve compiled a list of ten possible calls you might have to make in your daily work as an Estonian nomad e-resident working from anywhere in the world:

Banking and Payments

1. Your bank's verification line, when the algorithm flags you.

Sooner or later, the risk model at LHV, Wise, or Payoneer decides your transaction pattern looks weird. Sometimes the fix is a chat session. Sometimes it is "please call us to verify." The call is brief, the menu is usually in Estonian or English, and the only way to make it go away is to actually dial.

For LHV, the main support number is +372 680 0400. It picks up around the clock for the general line, but the specialists who can actually resolve compliance flags work EET office hours. From Tokyo, that is your late afternoon. From New York, your early morning.

2. Stripe support, when a payout gets held.

Stripe is heroic at the cheerful end of the product. It is much less heroic the first time your largest customer payment triggers a risk review. The escalation path that actually works is requesting a callback from inside the Dashboard rather than waiting for the email thread. I have had two of these. Both were resolved on a single call, after weeks of email round-trips that resolved nothing.

3. Your card issuer, when a card gets blocked while travelling.

Wise will freeze a card the moment something looks off, which on the road is approximately weekly. Chat is fast if you can log in. If you cannot log in, you are dialling the regional support number (US: +1 888 908 3833, UK: +44 203 695 0999, SG: +65 3158 3259), and "regional" is doing real work in that sentence if you happen to be in a country Wise does not list one for.

Tax and Compliance

4. EMTA (the Estonian Tax and Customs Board) about a TSD or VAT question.

EMTA's business-client line is +372 880 0812. The menu is in Estonian; the people that answer your calls speak English when you ask. Most TSD and VAT questions can be settled in five minutes if you call. The same question in writing takes a week and three rounds of clarification, because the person reading the question is not the person who would have answered it instantly on a call.

5. Your accountant or virtual-office provider, during EET working hours.

Almost every e-resident bundles their company with an accountant in Tallinn. The accountant works EET. You probably do not. When something is actually urgent (a missed filing, a missing line on a TSD, a residency question), the synchronous channel that resolves it in twelve minutes instead of three days is a phone call.

6. The foreign tax office in your country of residence.

This is the call nobody talks about. If you live in United States for example and run an Estonian OÜ, the residency country has the unlimited right to tax your worldwide income, and Estonia is the source country. The Estonian tax authority is clear that an e-resident is not an Estonian tax resident, and that the residency country gets first crack. Sorting out who taxes what, and how your bilateral tax treaty applies, is a phone call to your local tax office at some point in year one. Mine was to the Japanese NTA, in Japanese.

Clients and Vendors

7. The prospect who only listed a landline.

I run LaLoka Labs, and the most consistent piece of feedback I have heard from founders building B2B businesses on e-Residency is that small mid-market customers in Europe still publish a landline as their main number. If you want a first conversation, you dial it. They are not on LinkedIn. They are not going to answer a Calendly invite from a stranger. The phone is the channel, and there is no app on the other end to substitute for it.

8. The overdue invoice.

There is a well-documented gap between emails and calls when chasing overdue invoices: emails get ignored, calls get paid. The first one is uncomfortable. Every subsequent one is easier. In my own bookkeeping, the ratio of "I emailed three times" to "I called once and they paid that afternoon" runs about five-to-one in favour of the call.

9. The foreign vendor verifying your Tallinn address.

Banks, payment processors, and a surprising number of B2B SaaS vendors will pick up the phone and call the published number for your registered address before they activate your account. The virtual-office company you use in Tallinn picks up that call. You do not. But occasionally they will then ask the vendor to confirm something with you directly, and you end up dialling Tallinn to confirm with your own office that the vendor who called your own office is, in fact, you. The protocol is silly. The protocol still requires the call.

One-Offs

10. The notary, to book a remote session.

Estonia's e-notary system is now fully remote via video for almost any notarial act except marriage or divorce. By the end of last year, around 91% of all notarial acts by e-residents were done through e-notary. To book one, you call the notary's office to arrange a slot. It is the only call on this list that exists because of how good e-Residency is, not in spite of it.

The Pattern

Read the ten back. Notice what they have in common.

1. Every single one is outbound. Not one of them is "answering an inbound call from a customer." Nobody on this list is calling you. I have a list of inbound calls but that will be for another post for another day.
2. Every single one is infrequent. You are not doing this five times a day. You are doing it five times a quarter, on no schedule you can plan around.
3. Every single one is initiated by you. They happen when you need them to, not when a customer support queue happens to clear.

That combination is structurally wrong for a normal phone plan. A SIM card with a monthly bundle is a tool optimised for inbound availability and frequent outbound chatter. You are doing neither of those things. You are doing the opposite shape of work: outbound, occasional, on your own schedule, from whatever country you happen to be in this month.

What fits that shape is pay-per-minute, browser-based calling, with no SIM and no subscription. Open a tab, dial, hang up, close the tab. The cost on the day you make the call is a few cents. The cost on the day you do not is zero.

This is why I built PuchiDen. I have written separately about why I built it, and the short version is that I wanted a public phone for the internet, designed for exactly this shape of work. No app, no account, no subscription. You can dial from a hotel laptop with no SIM in sight and that is the entire point.

The e-Residency brochure will keep telling you it is all online. Mostly it is. For the ten calls it is not, you might as well have the right tool sitting in a tab.