Operating Systems vs. Messaging Apps in the Battle for Tech’s Next Frontier

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