

Ask HN: Are online free sms services illegal?  - zeynalov

There dozens of sites for sending free online sms worldwide. Most of them are ugly websites with tons of ads, looks like they are built in 5 minutes. But the service works. I follow them,  after sometime they shut the service down, something happens. I don't know why, and I'm not sure how do they do it.<p>In most of countries SMS is very expensive and there is no way to send SMS for free. I'm sure there are millions of people would use this kind of service. Would it be possible to build a paid service for sending SMS worldwide? Is there any legal way? I know that there are some API services like Twilio but they are too expensive. What do you think?
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vinnybhaskar
Though I am unable to answer your question of whether a legal and profitable
SMS system can be built, I'd like to point out a hidden answer in your
statement — "after sometime they shut the service down, something happens. I
don't know why"

Most of these "ugly websites" are fly by night operators. They are spammers
looking for in-use phone numbers to build a database. The database then could
be used to send bulk spam SMSes or could be sold to tele-marketers for a
profit. So essentially these websites never make any profit from actually
sending the SMS but instead scam the users to share their phone numbers.

Now you know why!

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jstanley
I was thinking about this a few months ago, but I couldn't find a way to make
it affordable.

Showing banner ads doesn't seem to be enough, since the cost to send one SMS
is greater than the profit from one banner. Perhaps that's why those sites had
so many banners?

~~~
zeynalov
I don't think that they use a paid API to give the service. They somehow have
a free access for sms sending. But most of them get banned after some time.

Actually if there would be a legal way, it can be very good business model.
For example; 1$ monthly subscribtion for 1000 sms worldwide monthly. There
some voip services, but they are too expensive.

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john1011
I'm using this service <http://smssheep.com>

