5 ms·
Penny SMS
- rbreve 17y agoI guess this is USA only?
- stirman 17y agoNorth America for now, working on expanding asap.
- timf 17y agoInteresting, signing up for a key. I don't understand how your per-month & after-the-fact billing model is feasible if you factor in per-transaction costs?
- stirman 17y agoMy new little project aimed at taking the complication and expense out of programatically sending SMS messages.
- nixme 17y agoHow do you manage to provide such a low rate? I also can't seem to find the TechCrunch mention that's claimed at the bottom of the front page. Can you provide a link?
- lurkinggrue 17y agoThey are going to make up for it in volume?
- stirman 17y agoThat's the plan :)
- moe 17y agoSo it seems you're using a bunch of GSM-modems with SIM-cards on "sms flatrate" contracts. Apart from the obvious scalability concerns I really wonder whether (or rather: for how long) the carriers will let you get away with that?
- stirman 17y agoNo, we went down the GSM modem path a while back with ohdontforget.com. Not scalable, affordable, or customizable :)
- moe 17y agoThen how do you realize the low rate? It's so much lower than what even the high volume gateways can afford that you're obviously not working on regular contracts. Abusing their E-Mail/Web interfaces? Sorry for coming across negative but I'm very wary about the reliablity here. SMS sending is most often used for some sort of user-validation and usually during a critical phase of the conversion process (signup, transaction checkout etc.). Reliability is crucial at that point, which is why most SMS gateways offer fairly strict SLAs. Do you provide any kind of guarantee that my penny transaction will result in an actual delivery? I'm asking because random hit & miss or "sorry, the t-mobile web sender was acting funny the other day" doesn't bring my lost customers back.
- stirman 17y agoAll valid concerns, and I'll tell you that we take reliability very seriously. We have been in business, as ohdontforget.com, for over 4 years, and have learned a lot in that time. We are not abusing e-mail or web interfaces. We spent months getting contracts set up so we could access the same data that major cell carriers use to route their text messages. For one cent a message, give it a try, I think your concerns will be remedied :)
- moe 17y agoOkay, thanks for the insight. Although I'm still wondering what volumes of messages you are pushing to get a 1cent/message rate. Last time I checked even large scale contracts (>10k messages/day) would be billed at least five times that amount. Plus fixed fees...
- stirman 17y agoPenny SMS is the API from a site I built a few years ago, www.ohdontforget.com. TC mentioned it here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/27/mobaganda-a-dead-simple-invite-site-built-on-googles-app-engine/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/27/mobaganda-a-dead-simple... CrunchBase Profile for ODF: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ohdontforget http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ohdontforget My CrunchBase Profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jason-stirman http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jason-stirman I wanted to use the press mentions for ODF, since it's the exact same technology, which is why I mentioned "The PENNY SMS technology has been featured on" Does it come off as bad form?
- mildavw 17y agoBad form? Nah. How do make money with such a low rate?
- jd 17y agoDoes your service work for European cell phones?
- stirman 17y agoNot yet, but I am working on it!
- hellweaver666 17y agoany idea on a timeframe? I have a project that would really benefit from this!
- elai 17y agoHow will you prevent API key spoofing? Capture that XML-RPC request, and voila, security breached until customer complaint.
- catch23 17y ago1 penny still sounds expensive for 140 bytes of data.
- silentOpen 17y agoIt is but the telcos don't operate in a free market. Additionally, the GSM standard puts SMS messages in a low-bandwidth channel, increasing scarcity. Of course, there are technical solutions to this problem but fixing the problem is tantamount to slaughtering a cash cow and it's not done.
- hs 17y agoyou can have 160 chars of 7 bit instead which costs you $0.0000625 / char instead of $0.00007143 12.5% saving
- thehickmans 17y agoAny plans for receiving SMS messages?
- stirman 17y agoYou can view replies to the outgoing messages, see the 'from' field description here: http://www.pennysms.com/docs http://www.pennysms.com/docs As for routing them back through SMS, we could do that, but thought being able to field replies via email would be more convenient.
- hs 17y agosometimes carrier in my country have good deal for sending sms, like 0.1c per message for gsm. $1 unlimited for cdma, etc (caveat: only within-carrier, far more expensive across-carrier) the thing is i can't have 4 or 5 digits short sms number; however, that didn't stop me either :d for gsm, i use gnokii, iterating on a list of number with corresponding message is all needed for cdma, it's a bit harder since no open source program is ready-to-use-out-of-box ... basically it boils down to sending `proprietary` at commands to /dev/bla (whatever dmesg spits) or port comm (if the cdma modem only has windows driver, forcing you to) my only gripe with sms is it's 'serial' in the sense i can't 'broadcast' -- that's it, i can only send 1 sms per say 6-10 seconds (depends on how busy the network is) there's no handshake? so there's no way for me to know if the recipient gets it ... and sometimes they get 'empty' sms ... maybe the carriers' mechanism to block spam shrug that's all i know about sms, i don't know about sms-center, maybe if one has access to it, s/he can broadcasts sms just like email if someone knows more / better, please enlighten me thx
- _pius 17y agoI've gotta say, I'm really curious how you're getting your rate. :)
- vyrotek 17y agoSo is the real service the ability to receive responses? Can't you send SMS messages via email for free already? I guess the ability to send messages without knowing the carrier is pretty useful. I've used sources like this in the past to send SMS messages: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=details http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=detail...
- stirman 17y agoThe problem Penny SMS solves is, without knowing the carrier, it is very hard to figure out where to route the messages to, since someone may have switched cell carriers, even multiple times, but retained the same cell number.
- geuis 17y agoYou need to drop a little bit of money and get this going over SSL. I (and neither should anyone else) give out my email, real name, phone number, username and password over a non-SSL site. I'm really interested in checking out your service but this is a show-stopper.
- timf 17y agoimport xmlrpclib s = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://api.pennysms.com/xmlrpc') s.send(key_txt, email_txt, phone_txt, "hello") That gets me "S:M:hello" on my phone... but good enough for my purposes (server notifications, etc, backed up by a more reliable method already in place..). Thanks!