Ask HN: Setting up an SMS server/gateway?

3 pointsmsencenb4 comments

Increasingly I have found text messaging to be very interesting and would like to build a few apps / play around with sms in my spare time.

Do you guys have any advice on where to start?

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http://www.twilio.com/ ?

Definitely. I've played with it and it's very slick. (http://www.twilio.com/sms/)

Also, if you just want to send SMS messages to your users, you can do it the "poor man's way" by just emailing it to their SMS gateway. The downside is you need to know their provider. It's not too difficult, however, and we actually do it in one of our apps (just have fields for mobile # and provider in their profile).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_SMS_gateways

If you happen to be on Rails, there's a decent plugin too:

http://github.com/brendanlim/sms-fu

Agreed Twilio is probably the place to start/ the most established. I guess my question pertains more to rolling my own sms server/gateway.

Or is that just not worth the hassle at this point?

When I looked into this a long while ago the cost to set up a gateway was too prohibitive for personal projects. My memory is extremely fuzzy on this but I vaguely remember a figure in the thousands.

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