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 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"
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?
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...
I realize this as a potential problem.. but then again, who would look for random events and rsvp to them... besides the slew of Techcrunch commenters that spammed the event mentioned in the TC article with javascript hacks :) (which are now being detected and disabled)
Bot spam is a different creature, and I have some measures to prevent against it, with more coming soon.
I wonder if there's a way to not let Google index it? Something about the robots file maybe?
