Hello 0/. I posted about this service on the forum a couple times. Recently I added a few new features that I’d like to announce. I hope that’s ok.
You can find a description of how to use the service here: https://internot.tools/ (at my new website!)
Or text “hi” to 1 (855) 651-4636 and it will tell you what to do. You get 5 free messages to test it out.
I learned to code while having a dumb phone (I currently have a dumbed down smartphone). So back in 2016 I built an application to get directions by text message. I posted about it here a couple times. Now the service can get:
business/location contact info
weather
directions (driving, walking, biking, and transit)
definitions
air quality (new)
language translations (new)
reminders (new)
My last month of offering this for free, I think I spent about 600-700 dollars on messaging and api fees. Since then I have had to charge per message to cover the costs. In fact, I’m still losing a little money every month, but I am happy to keep it going because people still find it useful.
This is really nice and would be beneficial for platform like Pure and dumbphones.
I wonder since you charge per message, and that is more often then with monthly Android app model,
how do you loose money?
I charge 10 cents per message, but you pay in batches, not actually one message at a time (I think maybe my previous comment was misleading).
Here’s a breakdown of the costs per message for providing this service:
Retrieving information: I use several APIs to get the information, and the ones that are not free cost a total of about 1 cent/message.
Sending messages (via Twilio): In a nutshell, this costs about 4 cents/info request. Here’s why: Twilio charges about 1 cent (.75 cents plus about .25 cents in carrier fees) per segment (about 160 characters). Each info request consists of two messages, a request message and a response message. The average number of segments in these two messages combined is 4.
Payment Processing Fees: Stripe takes 30 cents plus about 3% of each transaction.
Servers: I spend about $10/month on servers and databases.
Free Messages: I only charge for about half of the requests people make. This is because I don’t charge if there is an error, and I don’t charge people for their first 5 messages.
Is service US based only? Can you charge plus 38164 style number?
Beside dumbphone use, you could work with Mudita to implement it to Pure and with soime graphical reperesentation, Kompakt
It’s only US and Canada. But if anyone outside of there wants to use it with email or whatsapp, I’d be happy to set that up. SMS is just too expensive outside north amarica.
What is a “plus 38164 style number”?
I might be down to work with Mudita to integration this stuff with Pure. But I don’t really have the time to do that sort of thing for free these days.
I’m still not totally sure what you’re asking me. But if you’re asking if you can just use the phone number that currently exists from Serbia… Probably not. And if you did it would probably cost me a decent amount of money.