UK SMS options for my Web Application

I am looking to integrate SMS into my web application. My customers will be businesses, who will use the web application to keep their customers updated.

I have looked at several providers in the UK, and a typical price per message is 5p. Given the number of SMS messages I expect one of my customers to send to their cust开发者_开发技巧omers in a single day, this price is impractical. I can't pay the bill, my customers won't pay the bill, but perhaps my customers customers will.

Given this problem, what are my options? I was thinking I could send out SMS messages, and the receiver would pay? does such a mechanism exist?

Twitter must send out millions of SMS messages a day, how do they pay for it?

Look at Tropo: they offer UK numbers and have a reasonable API that you can integrate into your website.

Twitter just pays money, and lots of it: I'm sure at their volume they get decent discounts, but it is still a ton of money.

Instead of purchasing a X cost per message package, you might want to subscribe to a Y volume of SMS per month package. I recall Tyntec offering such services years ago. You might want to drop them a line to check details.

Prior to replying I checked Clickatell. The least price I saw was 3p. http://www.clickatell.com/pricing/pricing_wizard.php

Another I checked was Nexmo (0.017p to 0.043p, depending on the recipient's mobile operator) http://nexmo.com/pricing/index.html

I hope this helps.