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Show HN: I made a super easy way to verify users' mobile numbers using SMS
- panarky 11y agoHow can you give away 30,000 SMSs when Twilio charges half a cent each?
- ccheever 11y agoIf it really helps some cool new services get off the ground, I'm happy to spend a little money on it and in the FAQ it says that if you verify more than 30,000 numbers, we'll ask you to help defray the cost. I don't expect lots of people to verify exactly 30,000 numbers.
- bbcbasic 11y ago6c to Australia! That'd be $1800 / 30,000
- mikeyouse 11y agohttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Cheever http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Cheever
- fiatjaf 11y agoAwesome. The flow is really great and simple. The only problem is that you're giving things for free and losing money. People will not trust your service for something important since you can stop it at anytime (if you start to lose a lot of money).
- ccheever 11y agoHi- thanks! I open sourced the code so that no one is locked into the service. You can run your own instance if you like very easily. If it becomes very expensive for me, I'll try to just operate it at close to cost. I don't think this is a huge market, and I just made this as a weekend project because I needed something like it and thought others might find it useful. Also, the site says you get up to 30,000 verifications for free, so that puts some cap on how expensive this could be. Does this help you trust it?
- fiatjaf 11y agoYes. I will probably use it for a project I have here when I succeed in developing the moral strength necessary for marketing it (but it is not a big deal anyway, my comment was more general than about my specific case). Thank you.
- ccheever 11y agoCool. If you do, happy to help you get it set up (though hopefully it should be easy enough that it's trivial to do yourself).
- gargarplex 11y agoCharlie Cheever can afford to give away 30k SMS verifications.
- jacob9706 11y agoI got a C# client on there for you to review. (May want a separate repo).
- ccheever 11y agoSweet! Thanks. Just replied on GitHub.
- bbcbasic 11y agoNice, I got a text message in under a second to Sydney, Australia.
- ccheever 11y agoCool :thumbsup: I only tested with US phone numbers so good to know.
- bbcbasic 11y agoWatch out though it costs you more for those international texts. To prevent abuse, how about requiring a mobile number and confirmation code to use the api. I.e. it uses itself to verify people who want to verify other people :-)
- ccheever 11y agoThat's a cool idea. I'll probably do that if it starts to become expensive for sure.
- kiloreux 11y agoI was really thinking about implementing a small project that uses such software , and your free solution is a huge gift , it's very generous of you to do so , but if you could find anyway to compensate the money you will be losing through this , it would be great .
- ccheever 11y agoThanks! If there's interest, I'll probably make a way for you to use your own Twilio account and phone number for anyone that wants to do it that way. For now, I'm just making it free though. I'll be really happy if someone uses it as a part of making something cool or useful.
- chayesfss 11y agoVery cool, will be looking to use this
- ccheever 11y agocool. if you do, let me know if it works well for you.
- albertwang 11y agoThanks Charlie! Lets me check one item off my backlog of things to do. Genuinely super easy to use. Future feature request: Can we get a /status page to check whether the webserver and db are still up?
- ccheever 11y agoGood idea. Added an issue to track it here: https://github.com/digitimate/digitimate/issues/4 https://github.com/digitimate/digitimate/issues/4