

Ask HN: I want to add SMS to my service, tips/help/advice? - schtog

Lets say you start a GPS/SMS-service so you receive an SMS, do some stuff with the data and sends back what they ask for.<p>So you have a transaction and thus a way to make money. 
How can you charge money for this?
Can you contact a telecompany and somehow split the profits?
Like, you put a prize of 40c for an SMS then you split it 30c/10c telecompany/me.<p>Any tips on how to go about this? This must be possible right?
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iloveyouocean
How to go about this (generating revenue from Premium SMS transactions):

1) Secure a 5 or 6 digit ShortCode from Neustar(the only seller of shortcodes,
usshortcodes.com) This will take approximately 1 month and cost $1000/month
billed in 3 month intervals. Premium messaging only works with a shortcode, so
this is necessary.

2) Secure a contract with an SMS provider. I strongly suggest m-Qube, which is
now owned by Verisign. Their service is excellent in every way. Great APIs,
superior uptime and performance, superior support, very competitive rates,
excellent relationships with the carriers.

3) Draft a 'Program Brief' following the carrier guidelines, that explains
your application. These guidelines are very specific (things like how you
offer the ability to opt-out, advertise your tariffs, etc.) and your
application must conform to them perfectly before the carriers will approve
it.

4) Submit the Program Brief for carrier approval. This process takes between 1
to 3 months depending on the nature of the application, particular carrier,
etc. The approval process may, and often does, include redoing some of your
application to suit the carriers.

5) Assuming all the carriers approve your Program Brief, you can then start
charging users when you send them a response. (sending a message is the only
event you can charge a premium tariff for).

The carriers each have a specific revenue sharing breakdown that is dependent
on volume, price point, etc. In the case of m-Qube, they also take a small
cut. Negotiating directly with the carriers is another endeavor entirely that
I dont have any expertise in.

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jonknee
Unless you're huge you aren't going to connect directly in with the operators.
There are too many and the implementation is hell. You connect into a
middleman who has direct connections to all the majors.

Search for premium SMS providers. There are quite a few. It's probably not
going to be cheap, especially if you want a dedicated short code (they rake
you over the coals for that). m-bill.net is one that came up for me and I've
heard of them in the past. They have agreements in place internationally,
which can be a really good thing. But they don't list prices, which can be a
bad sign.

Realistically you're probably looking at $1000 a month minimum. And giving up
about half the revenue (I think a lot goes to the carrier, but you can't
really find out the exact percentage because the providers work off volume and
what not).

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ruslan
As for simple sending/receiving SMS messages, we at gtalk2voip.com use
Clickatell's SMS service, which is very flexible, offers good technical
support and providers a number of APIs including SMTP, SMPP and HTTP (we use
SMTP). Among their cons: their rates are quite high unless you pre-pay for 1M
messages a month and they don't want to provide you with a complete list of
rates associated to mobile phone (DEF) prefixes, so reselling SMSes is close
to impossible, cause you have no means to know how to account your own users
in real time :-(.

As for selling content over SMS, as far as I know there's no way for a small
startup company to get into revenue sharing deals with mobile carriers,
besides there are a lot many of them. Yet, there are some companies that
provide paid content distribution service, which you can use to resell your
mobile service, software or other content you have right for (some junk like
ring-tones, pron, etc). They act as a proxy service and they take up to 70% of
revenue. They usually have a small coverage of mobile carriers they work with.
Also there is a very high rate of returns/chargebacks, as end-user is always
right even if he completely abused your service or software :-(. We wanted to
use such service to let our customers recharge their balances in our system
with a single SMS sent. After I studied this subject (for Europe, have no
ideas about US) we abandoned the idea as completely profitless. If you find
out anything with better conditions, please let me know.

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tlrobinson
<http://www.textmarks.com/>

is free but they insert ads sometimes (always?)

~~~
jonknee
That's not for PSMS though (which is what the OP was talking about,
transactions and all that).

~~~
tlrobinson
I haven't used it, but TextMarks does have a system for responding to users'
messages:

<http://www.textmarks.com/dev/docs/recv/?ref=devsb>

~~~
jonknee
Responding to users still is not PSMS. Whole different game.

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mailanay
Please checkout <http://txtme.savitr.net>. This is a service started by my
startup Savitr Wireless (<http://www.savitr.net>)

We have built a SMS Engine / Framework which easily integrates with
aggregators / carriers to send and receive SMS messages.

We license out the Framework directly as well as provide API to our hosted
service.

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phpdev
I recommend Zong.com - They specialise in this and have an API.

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ivey
I've worked with mxtelecom (it was so-so), mblox (better than mxtelecom) and
mindmatics (best experience so far). The whole process will be frustrating
from the beginning, and it never gets much better. But it's doable, and if
your service is compelling, there's a decent amount of money to be made.

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gizmo
It's called reverse billing. Lots of information out there, and a lot of
providers. Don't use SMS as your primary source of revenue. Use reverse-
billing just for a "fun" feature and hope to break even on it.

~~~
ismail
i wouldnt suggest reverse billing, this is messy and complicated. Reverse
billing indicates that the recipient pays(This is usually used when requesting
content, that is not initiated via SMS i.e from WAP/Internet) However if you
are requesting something via SMS the easiest option is for a premium rated SMS
number.

Also, reverse billing is usually more difficult to setup premium sms can be
bought from any of the WASP's

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ismail
Look for WASP... Wireless Application Service providers, they usually have
links to all the mobile operators and they charge you a fee.

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bluelu
This is called premium sms. There are lots of providers out there offering a
service for this.

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ucdaz
You might want to check out teleflip.com. It's a free sms gateway.

