Penny SMS

http://www.pennysms.com/

by stirman • 17 years ago

18 34 17 years ago

pennysms.com

stirman11• 17 years ago

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

nixme• 17 years ago

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?

stirman11• 17 years ago

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?

lurkinggrue• 17 years ago

They are going to make up for it in volume?

jd• 17 years ago

Does your service work for European cell phones?

stirman11• 17 years ago

Not yet, but I am working on it!

elai• 17 years ago

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

rbreve2• 17 years ago

https ?

stirman11• 17 years ago

SSL enabled now.

catch23• 17 years ago

1 penny still sounds expensive for 140 bytes of data.

silentOpen• 17 years ago

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.

hs2• 17 years ago

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

12.5% saving

thehickmans• 17 years ago

Any plans for receiving SMS messages?

stirman11• 17 years ago

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.

hs2• 17 years ago

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

rbreve2• 17 years ago

I guess this is USA only?

stirman11• 17 years ago

North America for now, working on expanding asap.

timf4• 17 years ago

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?

_pius• 17 years ago

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

vyrotek• 17 years ago

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...

stirman11• 17 years ago

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.

geuis• 17 years ago

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.

timf4• 17 years ago

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

stirman11• 17 years ago

SSL enabled for web front end and the api.

timf4• 17 years ago

  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!

Penny SMS

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