3 ms·
It's not all peaches being an SMS-fist startup. Consider: 1. You pay through the nose for each "request/response" cycle. SMS aggregators will set you back a fe
by bradgessler 14y ago
It's not all peaches being an SMS-fist startup. Consider:
1. You pay through the nose for each "request/response" cycle. SMS aggregators will set you back a few pennies per message received and sent.
2. At some point you have to purchase a short code phone number, which typically start at $500 USD per month. Countries like Australia are worse, costing upwards of $1500 USD per month.
3. Phone numbers don't behave consistently globally. In an SMS world, you can bet on maintaining multiple phone numbers to access the same app. This can get confusing if you have a German mobile phone user in Canada trying to text an Australian phone number.
4. If you operate a US short code, there is rampant censorship and policing of how and where a short code is displayed. For example. If you operate the short code 88088 from your web app and a customer publishes this to their own personal website completely out of your control, expect to respond to a letter about taking this phone number down.
While the reach of SMS is high, I wish it would die a swift death and be replaced with mobile web technology because its really a horrible environment to build applications (much worse than any App Store environments)
If you decide to dive into SMS, check out this Sinatara-like DSL app framework we built for handling messages: https://github.com/polleverywhere/message_router https://github.com/polleverywhere/message_router
- andrewem 14y agoAlso, good luck getting your short code approved. I watched my co-workers struggle for many months trying to get a short code approved, and there was cycle after cycle of stupid arbitrary demands from different carriers. (It's been a while and I wasn't working directly on it, so the details are a bit hazy, but it was a giant mess and made me feel like we were back in the AT&T monopoly days, where you're a supplicant before the phone company.)
- coloneltcb 14y agoHey Andrew. Michael from Twilio here. Yes, the short code process is tough, that's why we also sell short codes. We are able to apply for them at scale and take care of the application process. It still takes time and money, but we aim make it a lot less painless. Check it out at http://www.twilio.com/sms/shortcodes http://www.twilio.com/sms/shortcodes