What do you hope to get out of offering a free sms service to people?
We've run a free sms portal in the past, had thousands of users most of whom couldn't give us legible info on signup, I mean who really lives at '123 up your mums bum' which is one address a user gave us, they tend to lie about their age and sign up with loads of accounts once the daily credits on the first one run out.
Yes giving away free sms will boost your site traffic but boost it to the wrong demographic, would you really want 10,000 cheapskates using your bandwidth and sms when all they're going to get you is another 10,000 cheapskates using your bandwidth and sms and not bringing anything else to the table other than an empty plate. There were hookers, drug dealers and spammers using the service who got their accounts deleted for breach of terms.....
After giving away 100,000+ sms and seeing more crap in the message logs than i care to remember we pulled the plug on it, 'mmmm luvvvvvvvvvv uuuuuuuuuuuuuu xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' is the kind of message your users will send, do you really want to be paying to let them send it? Personally I resented many of the abusers after them taking the p*** when we put so much work into it. All in PHP too.
We did it, saw traffic online grow, registrations grew and our bandwidth consumption grew but sales only just increased a little. Anyone wanting free sms messages is most likely to be 13-20 and skint. How would you propose to make this a viable service that generated revenues?
If you're doing it to gather mobile numbers to spam the networks will terminate you. They are taking a very low tollerence to unsolicited commercial sms to clean the text game up. Too many spammers have dirtied it and there are all the privacy issues to take into account.
Unless you have a national brand sponsoring this and footing the message and hosting costs plus providing promotion for it you'll be hard pushed to make a real revenue stream out of it. Then if you had a national brand behind it you'd be talking to a network direct.
There's a lot to take into account before going and doing this.
Google search UK for SMS aggregators
As WeedPacket says sms spam is annoying and it gives reputable text companies a bad name. All spam is bad and should be punishable by death.....
