Howto add SMS functionality to your web app | Hacker News Reader

Howto add SMS functionality to your web app

gumband.com

24 pointsdimitry24 comments

Am I the only one considering it a bit dodgy that the headline of this submission sounds like this was eg a blog post describing how to add SMS but instead you get to a commercial site?

I mean, I'd have nothing against this if the submitter had asked for feedback/review or simply had used a more honest title. :/

Wow! I really like this!

It seems to be a simple, flexible version of TextMarks, without all the bullshit.

[edit] Yeah, you should publish the prices on the page. It appears to be 5¢ per SMS, or $25 for 500.

Who are you? Verizon?

I think you mean 0.05$ not 0.05¢. There is a difference, and it's rather significant ($25/500 vs. $0.25/500).

What are you talking about? :D

lol... did you figure it out yet? .05cents is 5/100ths of a cent.

You made the same factor of 100 mistake that Verizon seems to make a lot. As it turns out, most people care about a factor of 100 when it comes to the amount of money that they owe.

http://failblog.org/2009/02/04/verizon-math-fail/

Is this US only? What is the pricing?

The landing page or at least the "learn more" page should have answered these questions.

As other commenters noted, they are providing something that a lot of other companies provide, such as the company I work for, Ez Texting.

Here's my plug: we can deliver to the US and Canada, our prices start @ 5 cents an SMS and go down from there, we've got a memorable short code (313131) and we already support a lot of people through our API. http://www.eztexting.com/api.html

I knew you were from Pittsburgh as soon as I saw your name!

Interesting product, but your "How it works" page would be more comprehensible with a diagram or a flow chart.

This would be an excellent product if you need a short code, but $0.05 is a little steep for me. I'd rather use an email address (text@gumband.com for example) to send my SMS messages.

Also, more about how it works: http://www.gumband.com/learnmore.php

With Gumband, your users send to the shared shortcode with your keyword, but if you want a dedicated/international incoming SMS number, I've been happy user of http://csoft.co.uk/ for about 2 years now.

Why do SMS web service prices vary so much? How does this service do a better job than Penny SMS who charge $0.01/message and provide return messages via email? https://www.pennysms.com/

SMS prices vary so much depending on the quality of service you want. At Poll Everywhere we pay a premium to SMS aggregators to have a short code (99503) and higher priority connections to cell networks. You could tap into the SMS network entirely via email, but the latency is too high for our needs.

The situation is awful, and paints a nasty picture of what the web would look like if it were not for net neutrality.

Apart from a nicer website, how is this service any different from Mobivity, or half a dozen others? Maybe it's substantially cheaper but I can't seem to find any pricing information.

Their pricing information is available after you log in. Here it is below:

  1 More Keyword - $5.00
  100 More Credits - $10.00
  250 More Credits - $15.00
  500 More Credits - $25.00

This is an API, not an application. In other words, if you want the end-user to get an SMS reply, you have to write code and instruct the API to send a message.

Mobivity gives you simple marketing tools (voting, pre-defined messages to reply with, etc.).

Actually, no, Mobivity give you an API to send and receive SMS messages, and they do it in pretty much the same way this site does. I know this because I've used them to do exactly that. I know it does the the marketing as well but it has a fully fledged SMS api too.

What if someone decides to spam you? Is there any way to enact daily limits or to block numbers?

Too bad they don't list any real pricing information. Also, what about non-US customers?

US-only for now. We'll edit the frontpage to include more information. Thanks.

Definitely cool but it would get expensive quickly.

aren't there email addresses for every common vendor?

yournumber@att.net

or something like that?

yeah, they exist, and you can google for a list easily, BUT there's issues.

For one, you have to know the carrier (or I guess send the email to all of them, but I could see that getting you blacklisted or something). Also, I think I've heard that they're less reliable and can get slow when a lot of people are sending to them.

Also, I'm pretty sure you'd have to use something if you want a shortcode. Having them put in an email address, though it would work, is kind of ugly.

It was the approach we took at my previous job.

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