SMS

I met with some others in Singapore for a project deployment, and one of the other people there wanted a snippet of information sent to him. He wanted it sent to his phone. He asked what the most popular messaging application is in the USA. While Facebook Messenger is the most popular the messaging landscape in the USA is fractured. One’s preferred messenger is going to depend on their preferences and social circle (Telegram is my favourite). Because of this SMS remains the most reliable way of sending short messages to someone. When I am traveling around the USA or in some environments (the subway, inside certain buildings) I use SMS because data service becomes incredibly spotty.

I am making an ASP.NET application for which I want to be able to send notifications to a phone with no application installation necessary. I will be using SMS as my message transport of choice. How does an application do this? There are a few solutions. One is to subscribe to an SMS Gateway Service and use their API. I found several companies that provide these services. But many of them do not have price information openly available; speaking to a sales agent is necessary to get the price. A few that I encountered did share their prices. I share what I found here. Note that prices are subject to change and the older this post is the more likely the pricing information is stale.

SMS Gateway Services

Vonage

Vonage offers SMS services starting at 0.0068 USD per message sent and and 0.0062 per message received. They also rent out virtual phone numbers at 0.98 USD per month. Verizon and US Cellular charge an additional fee for sending messages via long codes (0.0025 USD for Vzw and 0.0050 USD for US Cellular). If you would like to try it out a trial level subscription is available for free. Vonage provides SDKs for several languages. They also have full code samples for each one of these languages.

Ruby
PHP
Python
.Net
NodeJS
Java
CLI

ClickSend

ClickSend offers a REST API for accessing their services. Like Vonage they also offer SDKs for several environments and code samples on how to perform various actions. You will find code samples and/or SDKs for

cURL
PHP
C#
Java
Node.JS
Ruby
Python
Perl
Go
Objective-C
Swift

Pricing is structured much differently. There are pricing tiers dependent on how many messages are sent. The pricing tiers look like the following.

0.0214 USD/message up to 2,000 messages
0.0153 USD/message for more than 2,000 messages
0.0104 USD/message for 10k messages or more
0.0076 USD/message for 100k messages or more
Unspecified pricing for more than 200k messages

A dedicated number is purchasable for 3.06 USD/month. Short codes cost 886.82 USD/month.

D7 Networks

D7 Networks pricing is 0.005 USD/month for sending SMS for one-way communication. For 2-way communication the fee is 2.00 USD/month + 0.012 USD/message for outbound messages and 0.00 USD for incoming messages. While there is no SDK there is a REST API (which is easy enough to consume from most development environments).

E-mail

Provided someone can identify their service provider e-mail is an option. An advantage of using Email to send an SMS is that it is free. A downside is that when registering with your service the recipient must know the service provider. While I do not think that is a general problem there may be cases where someone does not know; such as when their phone is part of a family plan and someone else handles the service. Another possible issue is a person properly registers but later changes their service provider and does not update it within your service.

Why does a user need to know their service provider for this to work? The USA carriers have domains that that are used for sending e-SMS messages via e-mail. Appending this domain to the end of someone’s phone number results in the e-mail address that is routed to their phones.

AT&T – @mms.att.net
Boost Mobile – @myboostmobile.com
Cricket Wireless – @mms.cricketwireless.net
Google Project Fi – @msg.fi.google.com
Republic Wireless – @text.republicwireless.com
Sprint – @messaging.sprintpcs.com
Straight Talk – @mypicmessages.com
T-Mobile – @tmobile.net
Ting – @message.ting.com
Tracfone – @mmst5.tracfone.com
US Cellular – @mms.usc.net
Verizon – @vzwpix.com
Virgin Mobile – @vmpix.com

Sending messages in .Net is just a matter of using the SmtpClient class. The exact configuration that you need will be dependent on your mail service. For my mail service I have pre-configured the credentials in the computer’s credential store so that the information does not need to be stored in my application’s configuration.

SmtpClient mailClient = new SmtpClient("myMailServer.com")
{
     Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials
};
var message = new MailMessage(
   "FromAddress@myserver.com", 
   "phoneMailAddress@carrierDomain.com", 
   "", //blank subject
   "test body"
);
mailClient.Send(message);

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