📲 Remindly
SMS and email appointment reminders on your own Twilio account — no SaaS markup.
SimpleTexting starts at $29 a month, forever, for 500 credits on top of effectively the same carrier network you're already paying for. Remindly sends templated reminders through your own Twilio account, so the metered SMS cost stays on your bill at carrier-ish rates and is never marked up. $34, once. A busy shop's reminders cost about $4/mo in real Twilio fees instead of a SaaS markup on them.
Remindly screenshot is being captured — the app is shipped and real.
Features
Appointments
Manual entry or CSV import with per-row validation and error reporting.
Reminder rules
Any offset like 24h, 2h or 15min, by SMS or email, with per-rule templates and merge fields.
Two-way confirm
Clients reply C to confirm or R to reschedule via the Twilio inbound webhook, with confirmed / pending / no-reply status.
STOP/START opt-out
Compliant by design — STOP blocks all future sends to that number and is logged, START re-subscribes.
Quiet hours
Reminders due at 3 AM wait politely until your quiet window ends, deferred and never dropped.
No-show tracking
Mark appointments showed or no-show and get no-show rate per weekday and per hour-of-day to spot patterns.
Full send log
Every reminder is logged before dispatch with the rendered message, and duplicates are impossible via a DB unique constraint.
BYO Twilio + SMTP
The metered SMS cost stays on your own Twilio bill at carrier-ish rates, and Remindly never marks it up.
Remindly vs SimpleTexting
SimpleTexting at $29+/mo runs roughly $348/year — $696 over two years. Remindly is $34, once.
| Remindly | SimpleTexting | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $34 once | $29+/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $34 + your SMS fees | $348+ |
| 500 appts/mo SMS cost | ~$4 (your Twilio bill) | Included, then overage |
| Two-way confirm (C/R) | Yes | Yes |
| No-show analytics | Yes — per weekday and hour | No |
| Quiet hours | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted / your data | Yes — SQLite, your box | No |
| API keys | Yours (BYO) | Theirs |
Remindly costs about one month of SimpleTexting once — after year one you pay only the SMS fees you were already going to pay anyway.
Three steps, no subscription
Buy once on Whop
One payment of $34 gets you the packaged Windows installer wired up, or clone the MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/appointment-reminder-sms and run it free.
Connect your Twilio and SMTP
Drop your own Account SID, Auth Token and from-number into Settings, and add SMTP if you want email reminders.
Import appointments and set rules
Load appointments manually or by CSV, define reminder offsets, and let the scheduler send while clients reply C or R.
Honest answers
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Remindly is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/appointment-reminder-sms. The $34 buys the packaged Windows installer with everything wired up; building from source is free.
Am I still paying for SMS?
Yes, but only the real carrier fee. Twilio charges ~$0.0079 per SMS on your own account and Remindly never marks it up — you skip the SaaS fee stacked on top, not the carrier cost.
Where does my client data live?
In your own SQLite file on your box, self-hosted with your own API keys — nothing goes to a third-party cloud.
Own Remindly forever
$34 once. Deploy on your own server — your data never leaves it. No renewal, no account with us, no meter. Or build it yourself from the MIT source — it's the same app.