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Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

Just to build on what Eric said, we either use a single Android phone to relay messages for you or integrate with Twilio or another aggregator.

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.

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just curious, how much does it cost to send/receive SMS on a cell phone in Rwanda or other parts of Africa?

I see there is a limit of 30 messages in 30 minutes, is this carrier induced?

The 30/30 limit is actually an Android limit, and one we get around if you install the 'message packs'. We've had handsets send around 1000 messages an hour without problem.

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.

That's brilliant! I've worked in SMS business and dealing with the aggregators and their shitty connections was really annoying.

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?

Just as feedback, it would be nice to be able to use twilio worldwide... is there a reason you limit to US? UK sms works quite well now.

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