Necessity is the mother of invention all right and this post idea came into my cranium when I needed to get away from the atrocious SMS rates on my Vodafone talk plan. Here are some ways to text for free and cut down on your bills in the process.
International
SendSMSNow.com
This website allows you to send texts to international numbers to 49 countries and has a 130 character limit, which is quite nice. Most of the carriers in the US are supported.
If you’ve paired up your phone with Yahoo Messenger, you can enter the phone number in the top bar and text away. There are no ads in the texts but it does have a limit before the receiver must reply.
Twitter.com
You can use Twitter as a group SMS service. Just ask your folks to turn on device updates. Needless to say, you need to be registered at Twitter.
For Indians
160by2.com
This is one of the most painless free SMS services. What you should do is, open a tab in your mobile browser dedicated specially for wap.160by2.com. So, whenever you need to send an SMS, just open your browsers and send to 1 person or a whole group. And if you turn off the images, the job gets done in 5KB. This translates into 5paise for most GPRS users in India.
There is also a small Java app which should run fine on most phones.
Only problem is the 80 character limit. Oh well, you can’t have everything in life.
This website has a very simple interface which loads very quickly. You can send SMSes of upto 140 characters and it promises to deliver your SMSes quickly.
Way2SMS.com
Very similar to 160by2, but with a higher character limit (110 to be precise). The website is easy to navigate and SMSes get delivered rather quickly. Sweet.
I tried using their WAP services, but in vain.
SMSGupshup.com
Here’s another group SMS service that also allows you to join random groups of your interest. It also allows sending SMSes to a single contact, the only problem being, it allows only 3 SMSes after which the said contact is supposed to reply back. Pity, because it has the highest character limit.
YouMint.com
Though offers nothing new in terms of text-ing, it offers a load of affiliate marketing cash to its users. Like referring your friends to YouMint’s services or signing them on to the advertisers programs. Sign up, if this sounds good.
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