picoBeat now has a whole new messaging module for sending SMS! Because we have to pay for sending these, we also have to charge for it, but you’ll find our pricing is quite competitive and also very transparent: the messaging interface will give you a real-time information on how many SMS are going to be needed for your message, and with a press of a button will compute the exact cost.

As a SMS is cheap, payment works by pre-purchasing credits for your user account. Unlike many other SMS services those credits can be purchased in small increments (from 5 €) and will be usable for 2 years, so you don’t have to worry about purchasing more than you can use. To get you started, every account gets 0.10 free credits, enough to send 1 or 2 SMS to most destinations!

You might notice that some part of the messaging module seems useless or “over architectured”: this is because it was built to also work as a fully-featured email client, ready to handle multiple external mailboxes, and these features are disabled right now. Since managing email requires important investments in servers and storage (we are serious about having proper backup, speed and availability), these functionalities will be activated once a proper way of financing the service is found.

If you have any question or issues related to this messaging module a dedicated forum section has been opened.