SMS Integration

[bobintetley]

Quite a few people have asked about SMS integration. This could be investigated via AWS to see if the cost is viable.

The two prime areas that could definitely use SMS are sending documents for a signature and the adoption checkout.

This is a question rather than a statement, but could we handle SMS as an option in the emailform widget? Have email and SMS buttons at the top, email is default. When you click SMS, the To/CC/Bcc/Subject fields are replaced with a single phone number field and the editor goes into plain text mode. This would allow you to send an SMS from anywhere you can send an email and without having to update much code.

[bobintetley]

Amazon SNS is about $0.01 per text for US mobiles and around $0.03 per text for most other world regions.

Realistic ways to make this work might be to make another service like smcom_geo but for SMS to abstract it. It could keep a tally of the number of texts sent per account so that we can bill appropriately.

[SoulOfSet]

Just came across this and wanted to note that Twilio is also a popular SMS service. Depending on the way the SMS implementation is abstracted, would it be better to have the user provide API keys for the service and then implement the APIs within the application to call into it? I don't know much about Amazon SMS but I would imagine they have a similar system API key system? This would put the cost on the user instead of the hosting service for billing purposes which might also make things simpler for self hosted individuals. I think it would also provide some more flexibility in billing for users.

I think a use case for SMS as well is getting alerts on incoming forms. Although it might be worth noting that I am still (slowly) working on #350. With that I'm trying to build out a global event system to tie into webhook calls which in turn could be used with a service like Zapier for those sorts of things.

[bobintetley]

Thanks, that's a very good suggestion. It's pretty much what we do for people who want to use Google Maps. There are quite a few email to SMS type gateway services, which could also simplify things.

[bobintetley]

Another user has suggested that WhatsApp might also be a consideration since they have a business API and I presume no costs since it's purely data.

[MrBretticus]

If WhatsApp is in the mix, suggest making it generic and supporting Signal and Telegram too.