What is Reddit's opinion of
Twilio?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
34 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
The stats for the past week (since getting on TechCrunch): ~7,000 calls (which equals about the same # of SMS, though there are a handful of people who just call the # straight up)
The Twilio pricing is here. Each user ends up costing me $.04.
Basically, I'm the worst businessman you've ever met.
Edit: Grammar pwn and update figures based on more reddit traffic.
For sending messages (SMS vs. MMS capability depends on carrier - my messages are sent through MMS), check out this list. Basically you send an email to the phone number, and the domain depends on which carrier the person is using.
Receiving messages is a little more complicated. You can use a service like Twilio, which is a great service that has an API for sending and receiving SMSes and receiving phone calls. The thing is that they are $0.01 apiece, whether sending or receiving, and I don't have that kind of cash :P
What I use instead is a much more ghetto method, using a bunch of AIM screennames, which you can send SMSes to by sending a text to 265010 (as the phone number). The message looks like "<screenname>: <message>".
Twilio is usually the default internet-to-phone service to try, since their API is so quick to learn and they have easy PHP tutorials, but Tropo has a free developer account if you want to try them first.
If the only limiting factor is number of phone numbers you can always use something like twilio and just forward a bunch of phone numbers to your phone. The numbers cost $1/month. Since you won't be needing them for longer than the time to verify the account you can cancel them as you verify. Total effective cost is $1/account plus a tiny charge for the airtime.
If it uses SMS to verify you can set up sms forwarding instead. Charge for texts is something like $0.07/text.
Probably not. More likely is that they both use the same third party for SMS delivery, likely Twilio or someone like that. And that since they don't expect (or want) replies, they don't pay extra for a dedicated short code, the result of which is that sometimes the short code the provider picks will be the same as used for another customer, potentially including your competitor.
Sometimes Google and Microsoft end up with the same sender number too.
As far as the no gmail or whatever: its not just that its not a perfect system, it is a major error. You made a bad decision. You need to back out of that decision.
I am a freelance software developer. I am not affiliated with any organization. I could set up a mail server on one of my dev servers, and I am working on a hosting service so I could set up mail on that server, but I really have about 10 other things that are priorities for developing that service, so I'm not going to do it. Oh.. and I just read below you are using the domain name to infer the country. My new domain ends with .me, which is the type of domain which is trending right now. Actually .com domains are almost passe for certain types of new services.
So, and I'm sorry to have to use colorful language here, but just in case it may help you, fuck you dumbass, take the email restriction off if you want people to use your site.
What about something using Twilio SMS? http://www.twilio.com/blog/2010/05/sms-phone-verification-with-twilio-and-php.html
Pricing is pretty low. If he's using Twillio, it's $2/month for the number and $.0075 to send or receive a text, so if he sends 1,000 texts in a month and received 1,000 texts in a month, it costs $17.
It's twilio. By the way, not only is their product great but I remember also talking to one of their reps at a conference and finding a fellow nerdy small company who immediately sent us some shirts back when we gave him one.
You do realize the outage is Reddit's fault for planning poorly, right? Reddit, which has no money (their fault for not figuring out how to monetize in half a decade), for some reason decided to go with Amazon EBS, even though they couldn't afford to mirror their site into different availability zones. So if one goes down, all of Reddit goes down.
Other companies don't do this, because other companies have competent engineers that actually mirror the fucking site. Oh yeah, Reddit only has one engineer now due to the financial hole they've dug themselves into.
Educate yourselves, nerds.
Rather than use the GSM card if this isn't a very high traffic application then it would be much easier to use an SMS gateway provider like http://www.twilio.com/.
It will cost you a penny a text and a dollar a month for the phone number but it is easy to get running and the api is easy to use.
EDIT: We had a GSM SMS gateway at work that we paid for unlimited text messages for. It was a pain in the butt and always had issues. We switched to twillio and I haven't heard a peep in over a year.
Second EDIT: Unless of course you won't have internet access, then forget everything I just said.
Twilio or Tropo are your most available solutions.
There are some regulations you need to take into considering when bulk texting: http://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/can-my-twilio-sms-messages-be-blacklisted-as-spam
Twilio has an API which you can use with the requests module (http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/rest), or you can use their wrapper library (pip install twilio). If their API doesn't support something, you can probably accomplish your goals by polling and scraping a page, which would be a join effort between requests and BeautifulSoup or lxml.
That's awesome!
Good job asking for help, and pushing through it. That's going to serve you well on your coding journey.
If you're looking to level up your chops, may I suggest Twilio Quest?
That seems complicated. PagerDuty is for waking people up in the middle of the night, not automation. The UI isn't good enough to troubleshoot the exact problem, and it doesn't have much interactivity. When you have a problem, you will want to go look at your monitoring tools to figure out the root cause. And that is where the button to launch will be.
If you really think you can tell "launch/no launch" based on a tiny one-liner from pagerduty, than why use pagerduty? Whatever is raising the alert to pagerduty should just try doing the launch instead.
Alternate ideas: - Hubot - Chat bot for operations - RunDeck - Operations Runbook automation - Twillio - Write your own SMS chat bot
I guess I'm not really clear on the exact problem you're trying to solve. Sysadmin via SMS?
It doesn't exactly work like, phone companies arn't the only ones who can control phone numbers. Apps can use online services such as Twilio that allow their systems to get phone assign phone numbers and access SMS. By chain the company who makes the SMS app is paying a service like Twilio for SMS.
ninjaedit: didn't link right
You should set up VOIP of some sort, and make unknown callers have to hit a button to be connected to you. It's cheaper, and you won't get robocalled.
Google voice is a good service since you can use it anywhere you have Internet and you get to choose your phone number. If you aren't in the US (Like me), you can use Twilio, either as a phone proxy to let you get Google voice, or use it on it's own in a similar fashion.
You should check out Twilio. Their API is EXTREMELY easy to use and I've used them for a variety of projects. The above link goes to their international SMS FAQ page.
I think you have enough for an MVP. And your idea is pretty solid.
However, I'd suggest that you create unique phone numbers and emails for each ad. Those numbers/emails would forward to the customer.
This will allow you to measure the effectiveness of each campaign, have complete control over the process AND maybe even help you generate a new revenue stream or business model (think charge per call or email response, or letting someone taste your service with some free emails and/or calls).
And I bet the anonymity that you'd be providing with this would be another excellent selling point. "We never directly give out your contact information."
There are a bunch of services that will let you do something like this but I would start here http://www.twilio.com/elements/call-tracking
Edit: Twilio is going to be the cheapest route...but it's definitely not the easiest or most straight forward. There are other services out there that are push button. Google around.
As others have suggested you can use an SMS email gateway if you know their provider as well. Otherwise, I would recommend using Twilio. It costs 1 cent per message sent though, but it's very easy to use.
If you're willing to do a bit of coding (or hire some done) Twilio can receive SMS and has an API and is probably pretty reasonable for your transaction volume. Their pricing is really reasonable, $1.00 USD/month for the phone number $0.01 USD/sms.
Don't forget to check signatures in your controllers (or middleware) handling twilio callbacks, lest third parties start feeding junk into them.
EDIT: In fact, I started middleware here: https://github.com/bemurphy/rack-twilio-validator
If you are in the US all carriers have an email address for your phone that will SMS you.. like verizon is
I have nagios hooked into http://www.twilio.com/ so it will call me when something is down/up
Its easy to set this up your self if you know how to code.
Set up an account at twilio.com , pay for the minutes with an anonymous card (1000 minutes is like 13 bucks) and off you go. Your code can start dialing numbers and playing some mp3 file. Each recording is what like 1 minute or so? If you get even one person to give up money\gift cards etc. you will have made your money. Its just "Set it and forget it" so its free cash coming in with no additional effort past the setup.
Years ago to cheer a friend up when she was going through some rough times, I set up a phone number that she could call anytime and Ash Ketchum would answer and provide a random assortment of selected motivational quotes. It would end with playing the Pokemon theme song. I also used this service to set up a link to my washer and dryer and it would text me when the laundry is done. So there are legitimate uses for this service.
Look at Twilio. It's $1/month for a local number at $0.01/minute for inbound calls. $2/month for a toll-free number at $0.03/minute for inbound.
They're basically a telephony API service provider. They don't have any out of the box apps. You build your app with their API. However, their REST API is very simple and flexible.
Twilio might be what you're looking for. It allows you to send SMS messages really easily.
They have a bunch of guides, and there are quite a few hooks and plugins for monitoring services.
http://www.twilio.com/ have a pretty powerful API for this sorta system if you were up for coding something yourself. For the UK they charge $0.04USD per message which is pretty cheap.
http://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries there library contains a good set in different languages to get started.
A twitter feed would be better for this project, but if you want to work with SMS or phones in another project, there's a company called Twilio that has some pretty neat APIs for sending and receiving calls/texts. I'm not sure what their rates are, but I'm pretty sure that if your app is low on traffic you can use their service for free.
You may want to check out http://www.twilio.com/ and see how various libraries interact with their API. It may be a great opportunity to see code in use that is relative to your ideas. You can supplements your pursuit with a good tutorial or book to introduced to fundamental concepts of programming.
OK I did some research this afternoon since there seems to be some interest but no response.
http://www.twilio.com/sms - This looks like a great company and they offer quite a bit more functionally than just text messaging which may come in handy for me in the future (like your text marketing working with your apps)
http://www.yeez.com/sms_package.php - This was recommended on a few sites and seem to have a lot of features and benefits that are included that other sites that show up high on Google charge for.
http://www.txt180.com/ - Seems to be my top choice as of right now, doesn't have unlimited keywords but has the lowest cost and for my business since we won't have a high text volume for now maybe the best solution.
If you guys have any more suggestions please feel free to comment below.
Personally I use twillio(http://www.twilio.com/). Where I am they only offer sms options, but they do have voice options also. If you are in the states, you can get a number and then route it based on your business rules. I like it a lot and it is a pay as you go service, so if you do not like them you can always stop.
Here's what I do:
1) I have a Twilio account. They charge 1c/text message.
2) When I get a server alert, Twilio texts me the details.
3) This is my ringtone for that specific number. Usually wakes me up ~15seconds into the song. Full blast, works every time.
Which part of it? :) In a nutshell: I took data in Google Transit format that BCTransit publishes on their site, loaded it into a database, and wrote a web-based app that uses http://www.twilio.com (I also bought the local Victoria number from them) to provide a voice/sms interface.