

TextBelt is a free API for outgoing SMS  - typpo
http://textbelt.com/

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kennywinker
Neat, but the user experience is somewhat lacking on my carrier.

    
    
        curl http://textbelt.com/text -d number=<my phone number> -d "message=Yo momma!"
    

SMS from my carrier (305 000 01):

    
    
        You have mail from txt@textbelt.com. Please reply with 'Read' to read your message.
    

After replying "read":

    
    
        txt@textbelt.com() Yo momma!
    

Message came through, but with a fair bit of cruft.

~~~
krelian
Also cost you a couple of cents I assume.

~~~
gcb
Probably $5 or 10 a month.

Otherwise, A LOT of cents.

(someone who does not pay that silliness and have sms blocked)

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omarchowdhury
What API is available to lookup what carrier a phone is registered with?

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dsl
Are you doing LRN lookups to handle ported numbers?

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alpb
Nexmo offers 2 Euros for trial accounts (which you can sign up for
unlimitedly). Let's say I'll use this get notified if my blog is under heavy
traffic load every 5 minutes, how can I rely on it that it won't get shut down
tomorrow? Who are behind this and why are they offering this service? Just a
github-generated project page does not seem reliable to me.

~~~
typpo
If you're just making this for yourself, you might be better off emailing your
provider's email-to-SMS gateway rather than using a service like this.

~~~
alpb
I don't believe such a gateway exists in GSM providers of my country :-/

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mskierkowski
Cool (free, easy). Where are you going with this?

I wrote an app that does almost the same thing through the UI (not API)
<http://textfrom.me/> but it's not free. I made that project because I needed
to txt a group of folks at a specific time in bulk.

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kevinprince
So this doesn't work for any of the UK carriers you list as the api cant
handle UK MSISDN's. I am assuming your not doing submit SM to an SMSC and are
abusing the email to text apis?

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corin_
> _We support the following U.S. providers:_

No mention of UK support, it's American only.

~~~
kevin_prince
You have Orange and O2 on the list of carriers. These are not US carrier.

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Shank
I assume this works via emailing the carriers (e.g. number@vtext.com),. If so,
why not just release the source (or is that somewhere else?) over running your
own service?

~~~
mp3jeep01
It looks like that's how they're doing it since they have the caveat of "may
receive messages from txt@textbelt.com" As for the open source comment --
they're probably running a carrier lookup on the numbers via another API on
the back-end, so that dependency on another service doesn't make it as
straightforward as just open sourcing it.

~~~
sunsu
I would be interested in knowing what API they are using for the carrier look-
ups.

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blhack
Um...this seems pretty wide open to abuse...

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chime
You'd need multiple IPs to go beyond 75/day. If you're going through the
trouble to do all that, you might as well directly email
phonenumber@txt.att.net, phonenumber@vtext.com etc. yourself (
[http://hacknmod.com/hack/email-to-text-messages-for-att-
veri...](http://hacknmod.com/hack/email-to-text-messages-for-att-verizon-t-
mobile-sprint-virgin-more/) )

~~~
blhack
Didn't see the part about limited to 75/day :)

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usmanghani
What API is available to lookup what carrier a phone is registered with?

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xtrimsky_
How about google voice ?

~~~
amper5and
+1 for GV. What's cool is that there are libraries in many languages to allow
you to use it in creative ways:

* java: <http://code.google.com/p/google-voice-java/>

* C++: <https://github.com/mastermind202/GoogleVoice>

* C#: <http://code.google.com/p/sharp-voice/>

* obj-C: <https://bitbucket.org/joeygibson/gvoice/wiki/Home>

* Python: <http://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/>

* PHP: <http://code.google.com/p/phpgooglevoice/>

* javascript (node.js): <https://github.com/amper5and/node-google-voice>

I dont know how many of those are still maintained. Disclaimer: I am the
author of node-google-voice, which is still maintained.

~~~
christiangenco
Don't forget ruby: <https://github.com/jeffrafter/google-voice>

Though now it's looking a bit stale. Google CL needs to put some pressure on
the rest of google to open up more APIs.

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newAtlStartup
can you send to multiple numbers?

