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Comment by crazymik3 | Hacker News Reader

Very nice stuff! If you don't mind me asking, what do you use as an SMS gateway?

I'm using twilio -- I compared a couple of the gateways and twilio's seemed really simple for python. Here's its github: http://github.com/twilio/twilio-python.

I'd like to know too. I'm building an SMS project and the best I can get is around $0.03 per SMS (moonshado through heroku) and I'm not sure how I'll be able to make any profit at that price.

At my previous job we were using msgme.com Not sure what their rates are.

Beware of moonshado unless you're sending marketing messages - their support pages state that all texts sent from them have this footer: "Msg&Data rate may apply txt STOP to opt-out". Not something I'd want if your users are paying to be sent messages (like with this service).

I'm looking at using CDYNE for texts. At volume they also charge 3c, but there's no distinction between networks with their price so you pay the same to text Nepal as you do San Francisco.

Thanks for the tip. So far the texts have been 'clean' - no extra stuff, but I'll keep an eye out for that. The reason I went with them is that you pay $20 for 20000 credits and I thought it was a credit per SMS, but it's actually around 29 credits per message. Another person mentioned twilio- it's the same price but looks like it has some other nice features.

Yeah their credits are a bit sneaky :) Twilio only supports US numbers which is a problem. If you're looking at telephony companies, Tropo (https://www.tropo.com/) is only 2c per message and sorta supports international numbers. Their 'support' is basically "if it works, awesome, if it doesn't, well we never said it definitely would". It's worked well to Australia for me so far. International support is coming at some point, though I don't know if it will still be at 2c per message.

If you know the carrier (you could obtain this info from the user) you can just use SMTP (ie email). So 913 933 3333 carried by Verizon would be 9139333333@vtext.com (or something)

I tried this, but my carrier (Fido, Canada) wanted to charge me money for that.

Generally you can look up numbers and figure out what carrier they are. Perhaps someone should build a library to check a number for carrier, and then that could be used to act accordingly. SMTP has to be cheaper than SMS gateways.

That doesn't scale to the rest of the world though. At least here in Australia you're free to port your number to any carrier at any time (I'm on my third carrier with the same number I've had since I was in high school), so you can't use the number on its own to know what network you're sending to. I'm sure this is the same in other countries as well.

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