Pressing the Red Button

Sending text message alerts to cell phones is a cool feature to add to your application. The drawback is price and the need to sign up for a monthly service. Here I review the more affordable “pay as you go” feature of ipipi.com.

I have gotten a few requests from clients about adding text message alerts, also called SMS messaging, to their applications. I always get excited about working with new technology, so I eagerly started researching.

Adding SMS functionality is relatively easy. You sign up for a gateway service that provides an API (application programming interface) and you simply make calls to it within your application.

However, much to I and my client’s disappointment, the price of SMS messaging is hard to justify for minimal usage or for development testing. You need to sign up on a monthly basis starting at approximately $50/month for a bank of messages.

Then I found ipipi.com. They appear to cater more towards the cell phone power messenger but the also offer numerous developer friendly services at no additional charge. The two that I was interested in were sending messages via a web call and sending messages via email.

They don’t offer the api services with their free trial account, so I bought a bank of 100 messages for $12.00 (they are good for 3 months). The more you buy the bigger the discount. In my case, 100 was plenty.

Integrating the SMS calls into my application was quick and easy and sending the messages worked perfectly. I did have to email support to enable my account to send messages via the http call but they set it up the same day. Ipipi’s pay as you go service is a nice alternative if your usage requirements are minimal or you want to experiment with SMS messaging.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.