
Operating Systems vs. Messaging Apps in the Battle for Tech’s Next Frontier - antorobin
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/11/its-operating-systems-vs-messaging-apps-in-the-battle-for-techs-next-frontier
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montecarl
I'm working on an service that primarily communicates via SMS and works as a
bot that you can have a conversation with. SMS is expensive if you want to be
able to send and receive a couple hundred SMS per month per user (SMS costs
about 0.75 cents a message). This puts a floor on your cost per user at around
a couple of dollars and makes it difficult to have a price point of around
$5/user/month.

But SMS has lots of awesome benefits. It works for everyone with a phone out
of the box without installing anything and it gives you a unique identifier
for the user. It would be awesome if iMessage and/or Google Hangouts allowed
bots on their platform, but they do not. Telegram looks like the only
alternative to SMS for bots.

Telegram even supports custom keyboards for bots so you can have the commands
presented directly to users:
[https://core.telegram.org/bots#keyboards](https://core.telegram.org/bots#keyboards)

