Is it always free?
Wow I’ve had an amazing couple of days (and couple of glitches…) since our post went up on simplespark. Thanks! I’m still a little behind in getting back to everyone with their questions/comments/queries, but let me start with one question I’ve seen floating around:
Is it always free?
The short answer is “Yes, except…”. If there is any possible way for us to get you a message for free, the service is free. This means: we can email you, we can twitter you, we can instant message you - all for free. This means: there are a set of carriers that support “email to sms gateways”, and, on those carriers, we can text message you for free.
What it doesn’t mean: we don’t pay for whatever charges you incur with your carrier for text or data usage. So, mail2.im is “free” in those cases, but you might be paying someone else for the data or text message charges. We’ve tried to arrange it so you can always interact with mail2.im in multiple ways, and pick the one thats cheapest for you, but I don’t know which ways those will be. You need to check your carrier agreements.
What it also doesn’t mean: there are a bunch of other carriers that don’t give us any access via “email to sms gateways”. We think we have the right list, but, hey, if you see any carriers missing, let me know here we’ll add them.
If your carrier is not in the list, and you want to use text messaging to receive messages from mail2.im, we give you the option of still connecting your mobile phone number to mail2.im, but we have to charge you to cover the cost of the text message.
I agree this is sort of a downer. It would be nice if we could always get the text message to you for free. But, if you’ve got a carrier thats not in our list, you at least can decide you’d still like to get messages there and add your phone number as “unsupported”. We use Amazon Payments to allow you to put a few dollars into your mail2.im “wallet”, and then every time we send you a text message that costs money, we decrement the wallet by $0.10. It works basically like a prepaid mobile phone: you can buy $1.00, $5.00, $10.00 or $25.00 worth of credits and then top up later when you need more. If you ever run out of credits, we’ll forward your message onward to the next place we can and note that you need to get more credits. For example, you might get the message sent onward to your email instead of to your mobile phone, with a note that you’re out of phone credits.
I hope you’ll find this a reasonable solution. If you want to be sure that you never pay anything to mail2.im, then don’t add an unsupported phone. We don’t auto-reload your wallet either, so you’ll never accidentally pay more. If you’re using mail2.im to send messages between different countries, you’ll probably find that the $0.10 we charge for you to receive a text message on an unsupported carrier is cheaper than paying the full price of an international text message, but, its up to you how you want to get your messages.
In other words: mail2.im is always free, except when you’ve asked us to connect a phone that we cannot send to for free.
