Companies that provide shared use of vanity numbers, get good numbers that they think people will like and they offer to rent them out on a region by region basis. This doesn't sound bad, and in theory they are making a limited resource available to more customers. But in reality most have fewer customers than they have toll free numbers so they are actually squatters holding numbers that would otherwise have been available. They also take away the users right to select their carrier and the right to continue using it, meaning the shared use company can usually remove customers and often finds excuses to raise the already much higher fees after the customer is committed to it in all their advertising.
