| I had a bootstrapped B2B company that was stuck in a similar situation, lot of transactional SMS. We initially used (started over a decade ago now) SMS gateways like number@txt.att.net before we had a mobile app. These worked great for a while, but in the last few years they have become very unreliable. So we started really driving people to push notifications, but users liked the text messages. Especially if they believe your messages are important. As the gateways become more unreliable, users became frustrated and weren't interested in switching over to push notifications. I did all the research you did, and while we were profitable taking on SMS was going to become a major cost. I couldn't do it. So we took these steps: 1. Immediately stopped providing SMS gateway texts to all new customers. This stopped the expectation that text messages were included. These customers were told we only had push notifications. 2. We went with Twilio and with our decade of data we had a good idea how many text messages per customer. We begin offering a new package that included text messages. We really didn't mark up the price at all, we just covered costs. When a customer would complain about only have push notification option, we sold them the text message package. When the SMS gateways were unreliable for a customer, we sold them the text message package. The product is still sold like this today. |