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Comment by rcurry | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on a site called textmyapi.com (site's not up yet). It's a little SaaS platform that allows you to quickly define commands that can be sent over text messaging to invoke REST APIs. I got the idea when I was out camping and wanted to get some stats from an API that I had but I didn't have great internet connectivity, so I thought it would be fun to wire up my APIs so that I could hit them via text message instead of through a web interface.

I'm about 90% code complete with the MVP, would be fun to find someone else who is interested in this kind of stuff (preferably US based) and might want to help work on expanding the functionality or coming up with other interesting things to do with it.

Platform is React, Node, PGSQL.

my contact info is: recurry AT outlook DOT com

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Cool idea. I played around with something using texting as the primary controller for users and I quickly found Twilio quite expensive. I stumbled upon SignalWire and it made the cost much more manageable for lots of small messages and for lots of individual numbers. Just wanted to mention it incase it is helpful to you!

Thank you, this is good news and would cut my MRR to a fifth of what I was looking at with Twilio. Shoot me your email address and I’ll give you a permanently free account when we launch.

Interesting!

Out of curiosity, how would this work in regards to the character limitations (160 characters I think?) in SMS? What if they're large responses? Is there a hard limit on the total number of text messages sent per request?

I use Twilio for the text messaging, and so they can handle up to 1600 characters per outgoing message request, and larger responses could also be broken into multiple response messages. Users can define LiquidJS templates on the system so that you can cut down the size of the response message if you only want to see certain fields.

an idea that might be useful.. you may split the outgoing channel from incoming channel ; it's usually the sending/outgoing that is slow/difficult (small device not able to transmit too far, think a phone in a rugged mountain). Some satelite-internet providers work this way, using satelite for the send direction and some other usual channel for the receiving. good luck

Hi rcurry, loved your idea and wanted to help you. I have already send to an email.

Cool idea. Wishing you the best of luck!

great idea!

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