SOAR

SOAR has looked into providing a text messaging feature for your website service. What we found is that providing a text messaging feature is technically possible. At the same time we found the only way to guarantee delivery of text messages was to go through a 3rd party "aggregator" who charges a per message fee for their service. We decided for business reasons we did not want to get into a "per" anything pricing model with customers.

Many customers bring up alternatives that and we'd like to take the opportunity to explain in detail.

• Your own cell phone
  • You can text multiple people at a time on your cell phone.
  • Your cell phone provider will limit you to about 20 recipients of a group text though.
  • Thus providing you with a list of cell phone numbers to use on your own cell phone does not work.
• Cell phone email
  • Each cell phone number has a corresponding email address.
  • The format of the email address varies by cell phone provider.
  • If you send an email to the cell phone's email address that recipient will receive it as a text message.
  • The cell phone providers also have limits on this feature.
  • If a single cell phone receives too many "emails" or a single sender (i.e. SOAR) sends to many messages to the provider, they are cut off.

The above methods do work for occasional use. They will not scale to provide guaranteed delivery for a service like SOAR though.

The only reliable way to send mass text messages is to go through an aggregator. Many companies on the Internet provide this service, with a per message fee. That is because on the back end they are going through these same aggregators.

SOAR does not see or store your financial information for purchase or renewal. All your transactions are processed through PayPal which protects that information. To provide a text messaging feature we would have to start storing your financial information for on demand billing purposes. In today's day and age of financial hacking that is not something we want to do.

You can get a list of cell phone numbers from the Roster Export feature of your SOAR website. This can be used to import into a 3rd party text messaging service if you want to start text messaging members and pay the per message fee to do so.