We've been working in Rwanda for the past three years building interactive SMS systems for NGOs. This is our take on how to build a platform instead of custom systems to handle a lot of the needs here. We think it probably has some uses in the west as well.
Happy to answer any questions and respond to comments, curious to hear everybody's feedback. (please be gentle, not in the face!)
Thanks for submitting this. I'm a big telecom geek and I am curious about your connection to the phone network (specifically, how are you enabling these SMS to actually go out?).
Is this sitting on top of something like Twilio, or do you have an underlying switch? What's the magic here? Is this just an interface for laying out SMS strategies or is there more to this?
It looks visually appealing, I think you did an excellent job on the site, but the technical portion is difficult for me to divine.
Thank you for the hard work!
Edit: Wait, is this not SMS and actually just a messaging service delivered over the top? If so, calling it SMS is sort of dubious. Would adore some clarification.
One of the devs here..
There's several different ways your TextIt app can be deployed depending on where you are located. When you sign up, we present the geographically appropriate options for you. In some cases you will see Twilio, others you will get direct connections with a carrier.
However, no matter where you are we also have a pretty robust Android app (free on Google Play) that can facilitate 2-way SMS anywhere in the world.
Can you tell me a bit about what your experience setting up the direct connections was like? Frankly, I do this for a living and I'm curious what it's like for others. Dealing with global carriers is hit or miss for me. It's either BOOM DONE or years of waiting in vain.
What was your experience like? I admit, most of my conversations are focused on Europe and Asia so I'd be quite curious about your experiences in Africa or elsewhere.
Thanks!!!
Edit: To clarify, where are you unable to get carrier agreements?
So we are focused more on providing a platform that lets you build the app, and using the (rather effective) stop gap of an Android phone to bridge until the day we can use Twilio right here in Kigali.
One word of caution: not all aggregators are equal. I've had experiences where aggregators had their master aggregator change their rate to a particular destination and that aggregator then had to 3x their rates to our client. Not fun.
Telecom is a pretty messy world :/. Again, thanks for sharing, I really appreciate your time!
We work a lot in Africa and there are no Twilios here, and integrating with multiple carriers is both really expensive and really time consuming. So what we do instead is have the organization that is deploying a TextIt buy a cheap Android phone (they are less than $100) and load our app on it.
From then on SMS messages that are received by the phone are forwarded to TextIt and we route replies through it. It works amazingly well and lets people deploy apps literally anywhere in just a few minutes.
I see there is a limit of 30 messages in 30 minutes, is this carrier induced?
SMS prices vary a lot by plan and country, but here in Rwanda it is 10 RWFs per SMS on carrier, which translates to about 1.5cs. There are various promotions you can get to lower that further, in Kenya you can buy a message pack that brings the price down to less than .5c each.
Oh note that it is always free to receive calls and SMS messages in Africa, as everything is pre-paid.
If you have such low prices for messages you can't be on roaming right? So you have to have a phone in each of the countries?
Also have you considered the legal side of the business - there is massive amount of regulation in a lot of countries (not only western, I remember we worked in SA and it was regulated too) - would you just disable accounts after abuse or are you monitoring it?
How did you end up going there and building this? Was it sort of a by-product of working with an NGO or did you specifically go to Rwanda to do a mobile startup in a developing country?
Lots of twists and turns in that story of course, but that's the cliff notes.