When we started FreeSMS service, we knew that people would like the service but we were not very sure how much. In the short time since we started FreeSMS, we received very good response from members and we decided to improve FreeSMS as a service for the long-run.

There were two major issues with FreeSMS : i. Ensuring proper use of the service so that people could not use it for sending unsolicited messages and ii. Finding ways to generate fund to cover operational cost. We have come-up with ways to do both.

To ensure responsible use of FreeSMS, we now require members to verify their cell-phone before using FreeSMS. If people do not have a cell-phone but just landlines, we can verify that too. If there are students without access to phone (I was one of them for few months!), they can send e-mails from their .edu domain and we can verify them. The bottom-line is we need to have some verifiable information about you; we want to make it easy for the good-guys and difficult for the bad guys.

There is some innovation in our solution to the second problem, raising money to run FreeSMS. Many of you requested higher daily SMS quota and longer message length. We were looking for ways to do so without making you pay for it. As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention, we found a way. If you want a higher SMS quota and longer messages, participate in an advertisement program for free and the advertiser will pay us to cover part of the cost. Something is always better than nothing!

Some chapters from the advanced statistics classes that we took in college also suggested that the basic account daily quota needed to be reduced as that would encourage more people to go for premium account and also reduce cost for those who (for some stupid reason) won’t upgrade to premium account for free.

This new release of FreeSMS appeared to be necessary step to ensure sustainability of FreeSMS and we took pain in building the methods to verify your cell-phones and to provide you ways to get bigger SMS quota. If you think we are mistaken, please correct us and let us know what else we could have done. If you think we are right, we are happy that we were able to serve you!