TextBelt is a free API for outgoing SMS | Hacker News Reader

TextBelt is a free API for outgoing SMS

textbelt.com

54 pointstyppo27 comments

Neat, but the user experience is somewhat lacking on my carrier.

    curl http://textbelt.com/text -d number=<my phone number> -d "message=Yo momma!"

SMS from my carrier (305 000 01):

    You have mail from txt@textbelt.com. Please reply with 'Read' to read your message.

After replying "read":

    txt@textbelt.com() Yo momma!

Message came through, but with a fair bit of cruft.

Also cost you a couple of cents I assume.

Probably $5 or 10 a month.

Otherwise, A LOT of cents.

(someone who does not pay that silliness and have sms blocked)

What API is available to lookup what carrier a phone is registered with?

Are you doing LRN lookups to handle ported numbers?

Nexmo offers 2 Euros for trial accounts (which you can sign up for unlimitedly). Let's say I'll use this get notified if my blog is under heavy traffic load every 5 minutes, how can I rely on it that it won't get shut down tomorrow? Who are behind this and why are they offering this service? Just a github-generated project page does not seem reliable to me.

If you're just making this for yourself, you might be better off emailing your provider's email-to-SMS gateway rather than using a service like this.

I don't believe such a gateway exists in GSM providers of my country :-/

Just email it to yourself? Long before apple invented email you have been able to check mail on pretty much any phone made in the last 7 years? (or more?)

Cool (free, easy). Where are you going with this?

I wrote an app that does almost the same thing through the UI (not API) http://textfrom.me/ but it's not free. I made that project because I needed to txt a group of folks at a specific time in bulk.

So this doesn't work for any of the UK carriers you list as the api cant handle UK MSISDN's. I am assuming your not doing submit SM to an SMSC and are abusing the email to text apis?

> We support the following U.S. providers:

No mention of UK support, it's American only.

You have Orange and O2 on the list of carriers. These are not US carrier.

I assume this works via emailing the carriers (e.g. number@vtext.com),. If so, why not just release the source (or is that somewhere else?) over running your own service?

It looks like that's how they're doing it since they have the caveat of "may receive messages from txt@textbelt.com" As for the open source comment -- they're probably running a carrier lookup on the numbers via another API on the back-end, so that dependency on another service doesn't make it as straightforward as just open sourcing it.

I would be interested in knowing what API they are using for the carrier look-ups.

Um...this seems pretty wide open to abuse...

You'd need multiple IPs to go beyond 75/day. If you're going through the trouble to do all that, you might as well directly email phonenumber@txt.att.net, phonenumber@vtext.com etc. yourself ( http://hacknmod.com/hack/email-to-text-messages-for-att-veri... )

Didn't see the part about limited to 75/day :)

What API is available to lookup what carrier a phone is registered with?

How about google voice ?

I use google voice for everything, I find it important to be able to receive text messages on my Google Voice account. (I don't have a text messaging plan)

Another vote for google voice here. For the life of me I can't find an API that's capable of texting my GV number.

Scratch that; Twilio totally works with Google Voice.

Thanks Kevin for following up with me! That was awesome.

+1 for GV. What's cool is that there are libraries in many languages to allow you to use it in creative ways:

* java: http://code.google.com/p/google-voice-java/

* C++: https://github.com/mastermind202/GoogleVoice

* C#: http://code.google.com/p/sharp-voice/

* obj-C: https://bitbucket.org/joeygibson/gvoice/wiki/Home

* Python: http://code.google.com/p/pygooglevoice/

* PHP: http://code.google.com/p/phpgooglevoice/

* javascript (node.js): https://github.com/amper5and/node-google-voice

I dont know how many of those are still maintained. Disclaimer: I am the author of node-google-voice, which is still maintained.

Don't forget ruby: https://github.com/jeffrafter/google-voice

Though now it's looking a bit stale. Google CL needs to put some pressure on the rest of google to open up more APIs.

can you send to multiple numbers?

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