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Our gateway compared with httpSMS

The principle

httpSMS is an open source project under the AGPL-3.0 licence, with roughly five thousand stars on GitHub and years of active development. It also turns an Android phone into an SMS gateway, and it can be self-hosted.

We are not going to pretend otherwise: it is good work, and it is free. If you want open source software you can read, modify and redistribute, take it. This page exists to say precisely where our two products diverge, not to talk you out of it.

What httpSMS does very well

  • The code is open, auditable and forkable. That is a guarantee we cannot offer.
  • End-to-end AES-256 encryption between the server and the phone.
  • Webhooks, delivery reports, message expiry and rate limiting.
  • A real community, hundreds of forks, and a maturity the commit count makes visible.

The difference that matters: Google stays on the path

httpSMS reaches its phone through Firebase Cloud Messaging, including in self-hosted mode. Its own installation documentation says so: you have to create a Firebase project, collect your credentials, and replace the google-services.json file in the Android app.

And Firebase Cloud Messaging cannot be self-hosted. It is a Google service by construction. Which means that even on your own server:

  • your phone must be able to reach Google's infrastructure to receive the order to send;
  • if that infrastructure is unavailable, filtered or simply out of reach, your gateway stops;
  • the metadata of what you send travels through a third party.

With us, the phone talks directly to your gateway, over a WebSocket authenticated with HMAC, on your local network. No intermediary, and above all: it works with no internet access at all. A server and a phone on the same network are enough, which is exactly the situation of a practice, a warehouse or a clinic whose connection drops.

For accuracy: our app does use one Google library, MLKit, to read the pairing QR code. It works locally and carries no message.

What self-hosting it actually costs

For an installation on your own machine, the httpSMS documentation asks for:

  • a Firebase project and its web credentials;
  • Firebase Authentication configured for email and password sign-in;
  • an SMTP server;
  • a Cloudflare Turnstile key for the captcha;
  • a database and a cache;
  • and above all, rebuilding the Android app with your own google-services.json.

That is perfectly doable for a developer. It is not doable for the dental practice, the driving school or the logistics company we sell to.

Our installation is a single command, curl -fsSL https://sms-gateway.araylab.com/install.sh | sudo bash, a SQLite database in a file, a dashboard already inside the binary, and an app you install as it comes.

Their hosted version, and what it counts

If you would rather not set up Firebase, httpSMS offers a hosted service. The pricing is public:

| Tier | Price | Messages included | | ---- | --------------------------------------- | -------------------- | | Free | 0 USD | 200 SMS per month | | Pro | 10 USD per month, or 100 USD per year | 5,000 SMS per month | | 50K | 89 USD per month, or 1,068 USD per year | 50,000 SMS per month |

Two things are worth saying plainly.

The meter counts SMS you have already paid for. They leave your SIM card, through your carrier, on your plan. The monthly quota does not bill for delivery, which they do not provide: it bills for permission to trigger your own sends.

Our gateway counts nothing. There is no quota because there is nothing to count: the messages do not pass through us. Your only limit is your carrier plan.

Over twenty-four months, the Pro tier costs 200 USD for 5,000 messages a month. Our licence costs 69 EUR, once, with no ceiling. Break-even lands in under a year, and the gap only widens afterwards.

One last detail, taken from their own pricing page: they offer to install the httpSMS API on your dedicated server on request. That is the best possible confirmation of the previous section: self-hosting is hard enough that they sell help with it.

When to choose httpSMS over us

We would rather say this plainly, because you would find out anyway.

Take httpSMS if you are a developer, if open source is a non-negotiable condition, if you know how to administer Firebase and rebuild an Android app, and if your phone always has internet access. You will pay nothing, and you will be right.

Take our gateway if you want it to work without depending on Google, without an internet connection between the phone and the server, without rebuilding anything, with a conversation inbox, an automation engine, campaigns and a dashboard in four languages. It costs 69 EUR, once.

The underlying difference

httpSMS is an excellent open source project that chose to rely on Google's infrastructure to reach the phone. We chose to depend on nobody, and that choice is what we sell.

Both positions are defensible. They simply do not answer the same question.