

Ask HN: SMS-enabling an app for a startup - DanielBMarkham

I'd like to write a little app that performs a little service. As part of that service, it receives and sends SMS messages.<p>If successful, it might not be unusual for an average customer to send and receive 50 SMS messages a week from my app.<p>Is there some way to create this without getting into spending a lot of money? I checked into Twilio, but just by creating the app and sharing on HN, I could be out several thousand dollars from people just playing around. Isn't there any way to do this more cheaply?
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patio11
_If successful, it might not be unusual for an average customer to send and
receive 50 SMS messages a week from my app._

Will this create $20 a month of value for them? If yes, charge $20 a month,
pay e.g. Twilio $2 a month for your most active users and mouse droppings a
month for the majority of your users. Problem solved. If your app does not
create $20 of value when getting someone's attention 200 times, why bother
making it?

There's a app out there which, essentially, provided a particular type of SMS
services to a user population who thought SMSes were expensive. They grew like
absolute wildfire, because the company underwrote their SMSing. They had no
monetization in sight, because their core customers were _too poor to pay for
SMSes_ , and (luckily) got acquired before their telecom bill exceeded several
million dollars in funding. If that is a trajectory which sounds appealing to
you, well, that's an option, too.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The model I'm thinking of is freemium -- allow free usage over SMS for most
consumers, then charge for those who sign up for business-level features.

What's got me thinking is that, unlike a classic website/app model, using SMS
means I could be burning quite a bit of cash. Heck, it meas some random
competitor could just start making me spend money for nothing (From what I
understand, guys like Twilio will charge you for incoming texts even if you
don't want them) It's like opening up your wallet and asking people to take
money out of it. A very different model from the kind of control over costs
I'm used to having.

But perhaps I am borrowing trouble.

~~~
throwaway_skoog
I spent a year with a friend trying to figure this problem out. We created a
real-time Craigslist, allowing communications over SMS, XMPP, email and voice,
and hooking up buyer and sellers to talk to each other based on best match of
keyword, price, location. We only allowed a handful of friends to use the
service for our own testing.

The only real options we came up with were:

\- charge sellers enough to compensate for all of the SMS traffic

\- only allow SMS on paid accounts (still doesn't solve the problem of being
charged for all incoming SMS, whether you respond to the SMS or not)

\- find investors

The route we took was to convert it to a product targeted at businesses.

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georgespencer
We use TextMagic for our app in the UK. Our app sends an SMS notification to a
customer when they have time critical thing to look at. We really like
TextMagic because there's no cost for us receiving & processing an inbound SMS
(i.e. a reply from the customer).

There are a bunch of ways to help limit outbound SMS:

• Limit your hours. We only send SMS from 09:30 to 20:30. • Anything that
happens out of those hours, put into a "digest" format. "You had four
macguffins overnight." • If there are "busy periods", queue messages up so
they get one per hour saying "You had 3 macguffins in the last hour".

Hope this helps.

~~~
kevinprince
Agree with the safe hours piece. People really hate it when you text them at
2am ;)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Implied but not stated: better be sure you limit your service by geographic
area --or-- that you have really reliable location data for the users. My 2 AM
is someone else's prime texting time. :-)

~~~
r4vik
easy enough to sniff their local time with javascript though

------
maayank
Three words: Invite only beta.

Ask people who are interested to put in their emails and when you have the
available funds for X freemium users (maybe by some paid-for service) release
X invites.

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tinco
Are you sure you want to do this over sms? Almost everyone has a smart phone
these days and smart phones usually support push notification, which makes any
messaging as integrated as receiving sms messages.

SMS is an archaic system with costs kept artificially high by telecom
operators, there's no way around that except for doing your stuff over the
internet.

~~~
marquis
> Almost everyone has a smart phone these days

In your social circles perhaps? Most of the world does emphatically not have a
smart phone, and dumb phones still sell very well (more affordable and better
battery life, for one). Go to any transport hub in Mexico for example and you
won't find vendors hanging hundreds of styles of Androids and iPhones from
their umbrella-shaded stands.

~~~
ansgri
Another point is that internet connection is unavailable just too often. I
don't know of all world, but even in Moscow the connection in some districts
is very unreliable. I'm not talking of 3G, but of any wireless internet.

Wouldn't want a bank notify me of transactions with such unreliable means.

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akshayagarwal
I had a client of mine in UK who wanted to send out a crazy 100,000 SMS
everyday for marketing to opt-in subscribers. Of course, due to low margins he
could not afford a web based SMS service. The successful solution I provided
him was using Kannel to set up a SMS server which used to operate around 120
3G modems to send out those many messages in around an hour. Now of course,
this method has flaws of its own in the sense that it requires your SMS server
to be connected to the internet 24x7 something which can be hard but you could
use some local datacenters to do that for you. In India, typically web based
SMS services cost around 0.1 cent for a single message so most developers use
that but if you are targeting a global audience then the choice can be really
difficult. Anyways if you do need some consulting or development on SMS
applications feel free to reach out to me on info [at] akshayagarwal [dot] in

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sparrish
We love Tropo for our SMS notifications at NodePing. They're pretty
inexpensive US and international and are complete free for development.
Another option would be to use the common email-to-SMS gateways for sending
SMS... I'm not sure if you can receive replies that way or not.

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kevinprince
Depending on what kind of scale you are looking at you can get SMPP
connections which should offer lower cost and beter throughput.

Depending on what your product is individual operators maybe willing to help.

Note - I work in TheLab part of Telefonica.

~~~
tathagatadg
Hey, what would be a good resource to start of for SMPP for a programmer who
does not have much telecom background? I'm mainly trying to understand how a
vendor flexible solution can be built for M2M

~~~
kevinprince
We use <https://github.com/raykrueger/ruby-smpp> in our Ruby Apps to connect
to the SMSC gateways.

It is not a 2-3 month integration but does require you to have a clue about
telco's and depends on how you integrate.

If its less than a few thousand messages a day I would go for HTTP too.

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gambitsunob
An option for free SMS is to use the free gateways that a large majority of
carriers have set up. I have yet to find any legality against using them, and
would be interested if anyone had any information on it. It takes a touch of
time to set it up, but it is free. If you choose that route then you can send
an SMS message as a standard e-mail, and it's relatively easy to then monitor
an inbox for responses.

My SMS Carrier Data <http://www.visionsofafar.com/SMSCarriers.csv>
<http://www.visionsofafar.com/SMSCarrierGroups.csv>

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dholowiski
I've done a ton of SMS research, and the price Twilio charges for SMS is very
competitive.

One time I had this crazy idea that I never followed through on. Take several
pay as you go cell phones with unlimited texting, connect them (bluetooth or
USB) to your server, and send out messages through the phones. It's likely to
be against the Cell company's TOS, but it seems like it would work.

Also, investigate the SMS alternatives. Since almost everyone has a smart
phone, push notifications (or even boring old email) is almost as good.

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javadi82
Have a look at txtweb.com - a free platform to build SMS apps. You can get
started here: <http://developer.txtweb.com/>

Users can access your app by texting a keyword to txtweb's US number(s)
mentioned here:
[http://www.txtweb.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogid...](http://www.txtweb.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&blogid=4084&blogtype=blog&fromDetail=true&show=us-
shortcode-is-live--4084.html&Itemid=15)

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rabble
With Twitter what we did when we launched originally was simply get a PCMCIA
GSM card and used some windows software to post it to the website via a
protected REST api. Now i guess you could use a usb gsm modem. Worked great
for prototypes. Now i guess there are services, but really the usb gsm modem
method works well even today.

You can't charge for SMS that way and technically you're supposed to use a
short code for automated sms sending. Short codes are very expensive, so don't
do that til much later.

~~~
dholowiski
> technically you're supposed to use a short code for automated sms sending

FYI, I believe this requirement is USA only.

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azundo
I have never actually used it personally, and it may be too difficult to
integrate into a startup, but to get things rolling you might try looking at
Frontline SMS: <http://www.frontlinesms.com/>

Set it up yourself, get a couple of phones with unlimited texting packages and
incoming texts will be paid for by the user.

As I said don't have any experience actually working with it though and don't
know how easy it is to integrate into a custom app.

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callmeed
SMS on Twilio is a penny. So drop $20 into your account and you should have
lots of room. You can also limit/throttle messages to start.

I got a ton of traffic from being on the front page with this Twilio app last
year:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3364942>

And, to be honest, it didn't cost me much.

Also, I know the folks at Twilio pay attention to HN, so if you get some
exposure, you may hear from them (I did).

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prezjordan
Unfortunately you won't be able to spread the word on HN or other social media
sources until you have some revenue. If you're offering me free SMS - of
course I'm going to use it, and I might not be likely to pay for your business
features.

Solution: create this product and market it right to businesses. Once you have
a nice clientele, feel free to show it off to the world.

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pokoleo
<http://smsified.com/> has been in beta for ages, (looks like the free beta is
now closed). They're not too bad, in terms of pricing (1¢ per sms)

~~~
mgkimsal
twilio is 1c/sms as well - the OP's point was that letting people test/play
with it gets expensive, even at 1c/sms.

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kyriakos
are your customers US only? if not read on..

There are several aggregators you can use that can do the job for you via smpp
(some even have HTTP APIs). The company I work for is running a web based sms
service and we send our sms through InfoBip, TynTec and AMD Telecom (this one
is a bit dodgy I don't recommend it). The prices vary from aggregator to
aggregator so its best to try use more than one to optimize your cost per
message.

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pwpwp
Hook up a phone via USB and send it AT commands.

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mattvot
Nexmo tends to be cheaper than Twilio

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alpine
If you expect your average customer to send about 50 SMS a week, why not
charge them? Offer them a monthly plan to cover the cost of the texts plus
some profit.

