SMS messages
Text your attendees from your own Android phone and your own phone number, using the free SMS Gateway for Android app. Chobble Tickets does not charge per message.
How it works
Chobble Tickets integrates with SMS Gateway for Android, a free third-party app you install on an Android phone. When you send a text from an admin page, the message is relayed to that phone, and the phone sends it over its own SIM.
This means texts come from your own number, and attendees can reply to it like any other message. Chobble Tickets adds no per-message charge; each text uses the phone's own mobile plan.
By default the message travels through the gateway's free cloud relay at api.sms-gate.app. You can point Chobble Tickets at a private gateway server instead by setting a different server URL.
Encrypted in transit
The message text and the recipient's phone number are encrypted before they leave the server, using a passphrase of at least 12 characters that you set in both Chobble Tickets and the phone app. The relay only carries ciphertext; only the phone, which holds the passphrase, can decrypt and send the message.
Delivery reports and replies
The gateway can call a webhook on your Chobble Tickets instance to report what happened to each message. Deliveries, failures, and inbound replies are recorded in the encrypted activity log against the right attendee.
Webhook calls are verified with a signature and a timestamp, and duplicate events are ignored, so a retried delivery report cannot create a second record. Each message you send is also added to the attendee's contact history.
Example
An outdoor theatre moves a show indoors at short notice. The organiser opens a booker's page, writes "Tonight's show has moved to the church hall on Mill Lane, doors at seven", and sends it. The text joins a queue, the spare Android phone in the box office sends it from the theatre's own number, and any reply is recorded against that booker.
Limits
Texts go one person at a time from each attendee's page, so this is not a bulk text service; bulk email covers messages to everyone booked. The phone must be an Android phone that stays switched on with signal. A booker who gave no phone number cannot be texted, and nothing can be written until the gateway is set up. The rules are published as test cases.