Any suggestions for text messaging service?

[sKunKbad]

I've been given the task to find a few solutions to what we want to do, and wondering if any of you have used services that you recommend. We basically need potential clients to send a text message to a short code, then we would want the service to send an automated response and send our web server the details of the inbound text message:

 

1) Person is told to text message us, and we would like to have a short code, but we don't have one now.

 

So, for instance, they text "KEYWORD" to 13245

 

2) Service then sends them an automated response, like "Thank you. We will call you soon".

 

3) Service uses some sort of web hook (Simple HTTP request) with query params or post data to let our web server know of the details of the inbound text message, the phone number that it was sent from, and the contents of the message, in this case "KEYWORD".

 

That's it. It doesn't seem like much, but there's a lot of crap to wade through on a Google search, and hoping somebody would have some advice or recommendations.

[requinix]

Twilio is the most popular service and can do exactly what you want.

[sKunKbad]

Twilio is the most popular service and can do exactly what you want.

 

I'll check into it, but a quick look makes it seem really expensive for the custom short code. $3K to $4.5K for three months + per text fee. I wasn't given a budget, so I'm not sure what to expect when I tell my boss about it.

 

I found one that would be nice, textmarks.com, because they have a perfect API. The problem is that they use a shared shortcode. Because of that, we could only choose a "group" name that isn't already in use, and it's highly unlikely that we could find a great group name that was available, such as "help", "info", etc, etc.

[fastsol]

I use EZ Texting on my site to send out messages in an automated fashion but I don't have anything setup for incoming messages so I can't comment on the ability to do that with these guys.  Pricing for what I do is very reasonable.

[kicken]

I use Twilio for a couple small things and have been pleased with the service. I just use the $1 local numbers, not the short codes.

 

Near as I can tell from a little googling it costs $500/month for a random short code to be assigned to you, then it has to be submitted to the various carriers and they will determine if they want to support it or not on their network. Twilio seems to add an extra $500 on top and manages the process for you. You might be able to find cheaper if you shop around, but almost certainly no less than $500/month for a random number since that's the base registration cost (similar to how domain registration works).

[sKunKbad]

Well, thanks for all of your replies. We ended up going with TextMarks, and total monthly cost should be $89.00. They make it extremely simple to do what we need to do, and the cheaper price was important.