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What advantage do you get of using your own GSM modem as a gateway vs a big provider like Twilio or Nexmo? Nexmo says their pricing is ~$0.07/message in Burundi
by lucaspiller 11y ago
What advantage do you get of using your own GSM modem as a gateway vs a big provider like Twilio or Nexmo? Nexmo says their pricing is ~$0.07/message in Burundi, is it cheaper if you do it yourself?
- jmakaa 11y agoGood point, it might be easier to use Twilio, Plivo or Nexmo. However 7 US cents is ~109 Burundian Francs. I can't speak on Burundi SMS costs but as a comparative, in Kenya the local per SMS cost is KES1.00 or KES2.00 and pricing for Twilio and Plivo is USD0.02 and USD0.0154 respectively, which translates to ~KES2.05 and ~KES1.58... so I'm assuming Twilio, Plivo or Nexmo price close to the cost of an SMS sent from a local number. In short, the prices are probably comparable to sending a normal SMS in each country, meaning it might be cheaper to just use an SMS provider. Though in either case you have a fixed cost (and maintenance) of an internet facing server to "talk" to that SMS provider, so it might just make sense to do everything in one place (i.e. you still need to build the application that manages communication and sends SMSs either way)
- babayega2 11y agoThat's the point.
- babayega2 11y agoTo reach Twilio or Nexmo, you need Internet right ? In fact, there is a rapidsms-twilio app [1], so you can use any backend you want. But in Burundi, Internet service providers sucks. They can spend 1 day with downtime, without excuse and communicating anything. Beside an SMS in Burundi cost ~$0.02. So... Also Kannel is also used by telcos. So it's a good tutorial about using Kannel ... [1]: https://github.com/caktus/rapidsms-twilio https://github.com/caktus/rapidsms-twilio