Looking into doing this for my brother-in-law. he needs a password protected page where admins can send him or his partner a text message.
Simple stuff, but there are a few places to get SMS subscriptions with varying costs. I was wondering if anyone had used a service like this.
I don't know why, but it surprised me that you can't just do this without a gateway.
I've looked into this, albeit in South Africa.
Some cellphone service providers supply an email address to which you can send an email (via a PHP mail() call, for example) which is then converted by their gateway to a text message.
Otherwise... you need to get a gateway. There are some free ones, but they are rare, hard to find, and often cover only a tiny percentage of numbers.
I think most US carriers provide an email address like scudsucker mentioned. If there are only two people who will receive the messages that would probably work. Other wise I am considering trying out twilio one of these days.
I guess I'll just use PHP Mail() since the messages will only be sent to 2 different cell numbers. . . but some of the features from twilio would be so cool, I signed up for a trial anyway.
So anyways:
Did a little php thing, took no time at all and works great for them.
Now, there are others where he works that want to use it. Bro-in-law said "you should charge them."
Which I would love to, but it's like a nothing deal. Takes 10 seconds to add more people to the list. So I don't know what to do!
um...charge them.
That's the beauty of being the holder of the knowledge. Sure it takes you 10 seconds, but they sure as hell cant figure it out.
Charge a 1 time setup fee based on 1 hour or work per additional person.
wurd
What they ^ said. They are paying for your knowledge not your labor.
Right on. What I decided to do was give them an hourly freelance rate, and tell them it will take 20 minutes per person to add them on. So I hope there's a couple hundred of them.
Definitely charge. If not for the inevitable future support.
I have a SharePoint solution which takes no time to set up for our clients but we charge them for that and include a loose SLA.
Anyone have an idea why an SMS message (in this case, all of them) would be "held" and not appear for 2 days?
bro-in-law called and said he and his partner weren't getting any messages for a couple days. Then they got all of them all at once this morning.