HN Explorer

Ask YC:SMS Messaging...

28 points by raju ↗ HN
I was thinking of writing a small app, that potentially needs SMS notifications [That is, it should send out SMS's, to start with anyways]. I read about SMS Gateway on Wikipedia, and other articles on the web. It seems most recommend http://www.clickatell.com/ as they provide an API, but I was looking for alternatives.

Can anyone provide any direction here? This is a small project on the side for me so I am hoping it won't be too expensive. I honestly did not look into the pricing of any vendors out there, but is it possible to hack up such a service? I came across this [http://jmarinez.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/poor_mans_sms_g_1.html]

Any suggestions/pointers would be nice.

Thank you all.

20 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 53.8 ms ] thread
aaroneous
If you're looking for a no-cost solution you should consider an email to SMS gateway. You'll have to know who the carrier you're sending to is, and I know several of the carriers give a lower priority to these sorts of messages, but depending on your application, this may be a viable way to go. http://basicstate.com/htm/page.htm is a pretty comprehensive list
ROFISH
The problem with email->SMS is that if you 'abuse' the system, and abuse can be loosely defined here, you might find SMS messages disappearing. If you're only sending messages in the hundreds per month, it's fine. Anything more than a thousand you really need a gateway.
aaroneous
Totally valid point. Mobile carriers are very difficult to deal with, and almost universally have a policy of shutting off access first, and then it is your duty to try and figure out why it happened so you can navigate their bureaucracy in hopes of getting things restored.

I suggested email->sms for raju's question because he was looking for a solution for his "small app" that only "potentially" needed sms capabilities, so I assumed a low-volume transaction limit, for which email->sms is a cheap and easy solution.

raju
Thanks! I might start with the email->sms and see how that goes. I have noticed, too that carriers don't always deliver the email->sms and many a times they have disappeared.
e1ven
It all depends on home many messages you're sending. If you're sending in the tens of thousands per month, there are companies that'll pay you to send them for you (and include an ad)

If you're just sending a few, you should send them using an email. The only downside of this method is that you need to know which provider they use, which means either asking the user, or looking it from an expensive DB.

If you do know which provider they have, you can look up the email here

http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=detail...

If you don't want to ask, you could use Teleflip, who will do the lookup for you. Just email phonenum@teleflip.com

There was an earlier discussion about this, but we don't have a FSQ [1] or search feature, so I don't blame you for missing it. Take a look at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68227

Let us know which way you end up going!

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97491

raju
Hey e1ven. Thank you for those links. I did use searchYc.com to search for sms and text, but did not find those, so I appreciate you sending those my way.

To all those who responded, thanks a lot. I think I will start with the email->sms option, and then to textmarks (that really looks interesting, though if I were to open this out others they might not appreciate me giving their phone number to a third party).

I will be sure to fill you all in when and if this goes anywhere ;-) I certainly don't have $12000 for clickatell and if it comes to that, well, I might just not go public.

Feynman
I've done a couple sites in the past that used SMS messaging for notifications -- I found the quickest, easiest was to ask the user their provider and send the notification using one of the email->SMS gateways listed above by Elven.

Teleflip is nice. I remember giving them a try a long tim eago, only thing is I remember them inserting their brand into the message. I didn't particularly want that.

Also, speaking of Teleflip... I've heard people speculate how they're able to find the correct provider. Anyone know? Initially sending the message to all providers and then seeing which one doesn't bounce back seems spammy, but who knows. (And I suppose if you then cache the results for future requests, it ain't so bad.)

thomasswift
I have been experimenting with http://www.txtdrop.com/ - they add a little tagline at the end, but it works. You may have users that do not want their number going to some random company.

The best bet is to pay for one at some point.

raju
With txtdrop, I did not see an API on their website. Is there something I am missing here?
thomasswift
there is no api per se. You could post to their site programmatically.
rokhayakebe
just use textmarks. they offer an api for developers and all messages in/out/unlimited are free
st3fan
I usually go with multiple local SMS providers. I've written a simple service that accepts a phone number and a message and then decides which gateway to use based on the country code. I've put a queue in between so that it is easy to quickly push out messages asynchronously. It's less than 1000 lines of Java. Today I would probably hack it together with Python and based on Amazon's Simple Queue service. In even less lines of code :-)
manuelsimoni
A friend of mine simply hooked up a cellphone using USB and sent SMS using AT commands. Takes a bit of programming, but as cheap as can be.

http://www.developershome.com/sms/howToSendSMSFromPC.asp

aston
Sweet idea. Scales well, too, assuming you can find cheap cheap phones with pay as you go data.
pmjordan
You can even get GSM PCI cards that take 1 or more SIM cards. Presumably they exist for the north american system too. You might just want to check the terms of use of the operator, they may prohibit automation on normal tariffs.
theyoungceo
I use a programmable windows CE modem and an actual SIM, and I do inbound as well. I am well-versed in the SMS APIs and market and have worked with a bunch of the vendors. Clickatell is the best I believe for going the API route.