Starting the SMS service “on the knee”

    I’ll tell you how we launched the SMS-mailing service with a budget of 1000 rubles in 2 days and what came of it. Interesting?


    Problem


    In general, no SMS service was planned, I was looking for a free or the cheapest way to send SMS notifications for a small project focused on my city. Having studied the top Google at the request of “SMS mailing”, it became clear that there is nothing cheaper than 50 kopecks for SMS, and then I remembered the topic about Megafon with the service “Message Manager”, I decided to try it.

    Decision


    According to the description of the protocol with MSDN, a working "wrapper" was written in PHP. In conjunction with the “Easy SMS” option, the SMS price was ~ 12-15 kopecks. taking into account the daily subscription fee for the option and payment for the "Message Manager" service. With third-party SMS services, such a price could be obtained by buying from 1,000,000 SMS or more, the benefit is obvious. Among the shortcomings - you can’t change the megaphone number to a normal name or website address, the low speed of sending a large number of messages, but we didn’t swing it at large volumes.

    Idea


    And why not screw the normal API and share it with others?

    To overcome the limit of 500 SMS / day, another 9 SIM cards with beautiful numbers were ordered, which ultimately gave a limit of 5000 SMS / day. A dedicated server was already available, it remained to buy a domain and make a website. The first working version was ready 2 days later and submitted to the court of friends / acquaintances of developers, many liked the idea, someone suggested that we take up the project closely and bring it to the "industrial" level, tell about it on the hub The goal was set - to recoup the costs of the server and SMS for their projects, set the price at 25 kopecks. and wrote an article .

    There were no particular hopes for the article, and what a surprise it was in the morning to find about 200 letters with an application for registration and 3 offers from “industrial” SMS centers with pretty tasty rates! I accepted one of the proposals right away, negotiations were held with 2 others, which also resulted in mutually beneficial cooperation. The joy was short-lived, after 2 weeks a notification came of an unscheduled field inspection from Roskomnadzor =] But this is a topic for a separate topic.

    By the way, there is an idea to make a semblance of a free gateway to a megaphone, based on the first developments. The user enters the data of his SIM card and receives the same API as on littlesms.ru . Does someone need it?

    Also popular now: