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SMS ALERTING (Pay As You Go/Block Purchasing)
Hello everyone 
I'd like your opinion on whether you'd like SMS alerting for monitoring to be PAYG (per alert) or purchasing a block of SMS credits?
Thanks,
Alexander.
SMS alerting - PAYG or block of credits
- Choose an option!34 votes
- PAYG SMS20.59%
- Block of SMS73.53%
- Other (please comment)5.88%
Comments
How do you think "PAYG" could work? We give you a credit card and you charge it with 10 or whatever cents with each SMS sent? I don't think this would be practical or possible.
Honestly I would rather just have an app.
I imagine it would be similar to PAYG with preloaded funds?
Charged at the end of the month.
Sounds like a bad idea unless you have a very good way to collect the debts. Better do it all prepaid.
Alright, thanks
Yeah, prepaid seems like the best option to me.
purchasing a block of SMS credits
Pay as you go is a real money waster for the customer.
One of the monitor system that we have running picked up on a network issue one of our customers had.
The customer woke up with more 3000 text messages.
Imagine the cost if this would have been setup as pay as you go.
Do people even use SMS alerts in this day and age?
For years now I have had a very particular (and long) email address set up to trigger an alarm (much to my neighbours distress, its freaking loud). Fed into this is the monitoring system's highest assurity "server offline" check. Of course it only goes off in the home and office, other situations call for other more suitable alert methods.
Never had the situation where I have considered SMS to be a necessity as a result. But then again, mobile coverage is pretty damn consistent in my life currently (it hasn't always been).
Offtopic I have even considered adding a "Wake up Mathew" button to the staff panel lol. I actually made a RESTfull API for a joke with a friend at one point. :P
But all of the Matthews around the world really, really enjoy their sleep. Trust me, I don't get enough of what we call 'sleep'.
I hope it will have reasonable charge for each SMS, like Twilio offers for about $0.01 to $0.04 depending on location of sending number and receiver.
Why do they need to cost money? SMS cost like nothing, right..? I'd probably prefer to pay $10 one time and then not be bothered by $0.02 payments every month.
I would prefer email alerts,too.
Not looking to make a profit from SMS alerts, haha!
Pay per block would be better, although I would use email notification or push notifications instead(I have two phones with data plan from two different providers for redundancy and availability)
I'd prefer free Boxcar.io and/or PushOver notifications.
PushBullet is a lot better than those two on Android, the Chrome extension and push to desktop notifications rocks!
Plus it's free
PushBullet all the way. Easy enough to implement. No ongoing cost to the provider or customer. I get messages on my desktop, laptop, phone and tablet.
I think it's a legacy thing that people still include SMS and it really makes no sense anymore.
@mikeyur
But if someone has to go on a trip (Ahem goodhosting) or something comes up and no internet access most people still have there phone.
@0xdragon
As a fellow
cheap assLow End Talker, you do know there are email to sms and sms to email that mobile operators allow right? and its free (except if the user has to pay for sms to there phone) I seen a few library's for multiple scripting language that makes this job easier and cheaper and basically free for the provider. basically a user enter's there mobile providers name and then there number then the script sends [email protected] and they receive the text, some mobile operators allow 2 way so your customers will text back and it will go into a email address and a script goes into stmp and you code what you want it to do with that information,@0xdragon
Here for reference:
http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-send-text-messages-with-php--net-17693
Find your carrier here: http://www.emailtextmessages.com/
I use mandrill + my bash email script to send sms alerts.
Right.. but what good is a text message going to do when you don't have internet access to fix the problem? If you do have internet access (mobile data) - then you'll get a pushbullet notification just fine.