SMS Gateway for Windows + C#

Question

Hi

I am a little confused with SMS and how to send them. I been searching around and I see you can purchase sms texts. I seen some where you get 10k text msgs for $490 but I find this very expensive and I am wonder if there is a better way that would be well free.

I know many sites use have SMS reminders such as google calendar. I am sure google hosts there own server or something.

I also know of alot smaller sites that charge $3/month for their service and one of the features in their service is to send you sms alerts. I highly doubt that they are paying 4cents at text and allow unlimited reminders.

So is there a gateway that I can host myself that is free? Preferably something that works on windows machines.

Or do these sites use like email to sms or something like that and thats how they get it for free?

I am trying to figure out how to make it free on my end to send. I find it kinda stupid that services have to pay to send these messages. I would have figured it would be like email where you can send them for free.

I understand the person receiving the SMS message might have to pay but that depends on their cell phone plan.

Answer 1

One way to do this is to use an email to sms gateway. Here, you just send a short plaintext email to a special address like @vzwtext.com for a Verizon number.

A quick search turned up this list: http://www.mutube.com/projects/open-email-to-sms/gateway-list/.

Answer 2

Your options:

Email-to-SMS Gateway

Pros

• Free

Cons

• Delivery not as reliable as native
• Non-standard message formatting between carriers
• Subject to stricter 'spam' guards that can catch non-spam messages
• You have to know what carrier your user is using, and they have to notify you if it changes

SMS Gateway

Pros

• More reliable
• Consistent formatting
• Easily handle replies
• Virtually indistinguishable to a carrier from text messages sent from a human
• Most offer a simple API

Cons

• Costs money. This won't change until the carriers stop charging for them on both ends, which I wouldn't hold your breath for since it's such a huge profit center for them.

Do-it-yourself

Pros

• You get to learn how GSM modems and AT commands work making you a 1337 hax0r.

Cons

• Complicated
• Still have to pay carriers per message
• Doesn't scale.

I happen to work for a gateway (Twilio) so I deal with this question a lot. We frequently have customers that started down the email route and gave up due to the hassles associated with that method. You can get away with email-to-SMS for small volume, non-important messages. If you're serious about it, sign up for a gateway. There are a lot of them out there.