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Penny SMS

pennysms.com

18 pointsstirman34 comments

You need to drop a little bit of money and get this going over SSL. I (and neither should anyone else) give out my email, real name, phone number, username and password over a non-SSL site. I'm really interested in checking out your service but this is a show-stopper.

What's more worrisome is that the API key is sent out over http on each call...

SSL enabled for web front end and the api.

Nice! That makes me and I'm sure many others more comfortable.

How will you prevent API key spoofing? Capture that XML-RPC request, and voila, security breached until customer complaint.

https ?

SSL enabled now.

My new little project aimed at taking the complication and expense out of programatically sending SMS messages.

How do you manage to provide such a low rate?

I also can't seem to find the TechCrunch mention that's claimed at the bottom of the front page. Can you provide a link?

Penny SMS is the API from a site I built a few years ago, www.ohdontforget.com.

TC mentioned it here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/27/mobaganda-a-dead-simple...

CrunchBase Profile for ODF: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/ohdontforget

My CrunchBase Profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jason-stirman

I wanted to use the press mentions for ODF, since it's the exact same technology, which is why I mentioned "The PENNY SMS technology has been featured on"

Does it come off as bad form?

Bad form? Nah.

How do make money with such a low rate?

They are going to make up for it in volume?

That's the plan :)

So it seems you're using a bunch of GSM-modems with SIM-cards on "sms flatrate" contracts. Apart from the obvious scalability concerns I really wonder whether (or rather: for how long) the carriers will let you get away with that?

No, we went down the GSM modem path a while back with ohdontforget.com. Not scalable, affordable, or customizable :)

Then how do you realize the low rate?

It's so much lower than what even the high volume gateways can afford that you're obviously not working on regular contracts.

Abusing their E-Mail/Web interfaces?

Sorry for coming across negative but I'm very wary about the reliablity here.

SMS sending is most often used for some sort of user-validation and usually during a critical phase of the conversion process (signup, transaction checkout etc.). Reliability is crucial at that point, which is why most SMS gateways offer fairly strict SLAs.

Do you provide any kind of guarantee that my penny transaction will result in an actual delivery? I'm asking because random hit & miss or "sorry, the t-mobile web sender was acting funny the other day" doesn't bring my lost customers back.

All valid concerns, and I'll tell you that we take reliability very seriously. We have been in business, as ohdontforget.com, for over 4 years, and have learned a lot in that time.

We are not abusing e-mail or web interfaces. We spent months getting contracts set up so we could access the same data that major cell carriers use to route their text messages.

For one cent a message, give it a try, I think your concerns will be remedied :)

Okay, thanks for the insight. Although I'm still wondering what volumes of messages you are pushing to get a 1cent/message rate. Last time I checked even large scale contracts (>10k messages/day) would be billed at least five times that amount. Plus fixed fees...

Does your service work for European cell phones?

Not yet, but I am working on it!

any idea on a timeframe? I have a project that would really benefit from this!

  import xmlrpclib
  s = xmlrpclib.ServerProxy('http://api.pennysms.com/xmlrpc')
  s.send(key_txt, email_txt, phone_txt, "hello")

That gets me "S:M:hello" on my phone... but good enough for my purposes (server notifications, etc, backed up by a more reliable method already in place..).

Thanks!

So is the real service the ability to receive responses? Can't you send SMS messages via email for free already? I guess the ability to send messages without knowing the carrier is pretty useful.

I've used sources like this in the past to send SMS messages: http://www.livejournal.com/tools/textmessage.bml?mode=detail...

The problem Penny SMS solves is, without knowing the carrier, it is very hard to figure out where to route the messages to, since someone may have switched cell carriers, even multiple times, but retained the same cell number.

I've gotta say, I'm really curious how you're getting your rate. :)

sometimes carrier in my country have good deal for sending sms, like 0.1c per message for gsm. $1 unlimited for cdma, etc (caveat: only within-carrier, far more expensive across-carrier)

the thing is i can't have 4 or 5 digits short sms number; however, that didn't stop me either :d

for gsm, i use gnokii, iterating on a list of number with corresponding message is all needed

for cdma, it's a bit harder since no open source program is ready-to-use-out-of-box ... basically it boils down to sending `proprietary` at commands to /dev/bla (whatever dmesg spits) or port comm (if the cdma modem only has windows driver, forcing you to)

my only gripe with sms is it's 'serial' in the sense i can't 'broadcast' -- that's it, i can only send 1 sms per say 6-10 seconds (depends on how busy the network is)

there's no handshake? so there's no way for me to know if the recipient gets it ... and sometimes they get 'empty' sms ... maybe the carriers' mechanism to block spam shrug

that's all i know about sms, i don't know about sms-center, maybe if one has access to it, s/he can broadcasts sms just like email

if someone knows more / better, please enlighten me thx

Any plans for receiving SMS messages?

You can view replies to the outgoing messages, see the 'from' field description here: http://www.pennysms.com/docs

As for routing them back through SMS, we could do that, but thought being able to field replies via email would be more convenient.

Interesting, signing up for a key.

I don't understand how your per-month & after-the-fact billing model is feasible if you factor in per-transaction costs?

I guess this is USA only?

North America for now, working on expanding asap.

1 penny still sounds expensive for 140 bytes of data.

It is but the telcos don't operate in a free market. Additionally, the GSM standard puts SMS messages in a low-bandwidth channel, increasing scarcity. Of course, there are technical solutions to this problem but fixing the problem is tantamount to slaughtering a cash cow and it's not done.

you can have 160 chars of 7 bit instead which costs you $0.0000625 / char instead of $0.00007143

12.5% saving

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