We can already add a ‘send email’ action to a button in a column of a grid. I’d like to have the option to send an SMS instead, or as well.
Thank you.
Hey Neil. Great Idea!
This is currently possible with a little bit of a workaround -
Sending an SMS in Knack is possible but will take some set up and manual input. Additionally, sending the text would work more like sending an email.
A little bit of background…
Most cell carriers have a standard nomenclature that they use if sending a message to a phone number from your email client. For example, in order to send an email to a phone number who’s cell carrier is AT&T you would need to use the following email format: [phonenumber]@txt.att.net. EX. 6028675309@text.att.net.
You could build out your forms to capture the phone number and cell phone carrier. You can even go as far as using a text formula to combine these two fields. Either way you would ultimately need to manually input this new email address into a new email field. You can then use this new email field to send notifications to, along with the email notifications.
Hi Ally , and thanks for the detailled message. Its obviously possible to do this. First of all I’m in the UK, and so
I dont know if the method works exactly here relating to carriers. However, we are a business of caterers and I had a vision that someone writes a clever bit of code and my part in this would be that we’d hold a mobile number against the user record, and in the action field we select SMS, rather than email from a drop down list, and as if by magic, thats what happens and we send them an SMS. I don’t want to sound facetious, but I don’t need to know how its done, in fact I dont want to know how its done. Thats your skill base. I just want to use it. I have resigned myself to never having this feature available, btw. I can’t imagine it would be relevant to lots of users, and I’m sure you can use the development time more effectively. I was just reading through some of the new feature ideas, which are mostly low level ones and I thought I’d stick my dimes worth in.! Its just a nice little function that doesn’t sound like months of work. Warm regards Neil
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Neil, you are absolutely spot on. It is our responsibility to listen to our wonderful clients and make sure that they are getting what they want and need out of this product.
Thanks for adding this feature request - I am sure there are plenty of other companies who will benefit from a feature like this!
Hey @NeilParkin60970
I’ve only just seen this thread and can see that my good friend @Ally has replied in detail.
I can confirm that the US carrier method outlined is not available in the U.K. - I live in West Berkshire, 60 miles west of London.
I appreciate that you’re not interested in how the solution works but there is a way to achieve this integrating Knack with Make.com and connecting it to an SMS service like Twilio.
Make has a free plan with a 1,000 api calls per month, this will be ok for sending a few texts per day. The next plan is only $9 per month (£7) and you get 10,000 api calls per month…. so peanuts really.
Twilio charge about 3p per text.
So it’s not free like sending emails in Knack but it is possible by integrating Knack to Twilio using Make to connect the API’s without code.
You need to have a SMS carrier, you can’t simply code it in Knack.
I’ve used the above method for a couple of clients and you can decided via Knack whether to send a text or email. You’ll obviously need a number in Knack to pass through to Twilio.
You’d likely need to hire a Knack / Make person to assist. Happy to chat if you want to send me a DM.
One of my favourite sayings that your post brought back to my mind:
“I’ve no idea how cotton is made but I’m very happy to wear shirts” 
Happy building 
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Clicksend have an email to SMS feature which will then work in any country they support
Hi Carl and Amaan, and thank you for you inputs. I tried Clicksend, and its okay, except I then have another product to learn and pay for. Its a similar argument with Make and Twilio. These are products that I will touch once a year or less. We never have the chance to build any skills and to be honest, I dont want to pay anyone to do it either.
I think my simple question highlights a bigger philosophical question. How little code should you have to write for a product to be ‘no-code’. The first caveat is that I don’t expect every feature idea to be in the product. That would be silly. However, at what point does the developer draw the line, and say ‘that’s product, thats custom’. I can see people like me being put-off by the coding aspects of achieving small additions of functionality. Similarly, I can see that developers use Knack as the core of something they can extend and customise easily, in order to make a living for their businesses. I don’t have an answer, by the way.(…!) but every time I sit down with Knack Builder, there seems to be a thing that would take little work, be pretty generic, but isn’t there. SMS is an example, but Label printing is another that we need, that is going to go out for some JS to compose, and maintain for the future. Anyway, enough of the mental gymnastics for today. Thanks to all for your responses and interest.
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Neil,
I have had some of the same questions when I first ventured into the “no-code” space and I love that you drew a line with acknowledging that not all features can be available. It might be helpful to think about products within the specialty. Can your phone carrier provide database solutions? Should your database provide phone carrier solutions? I think this is where the lines get blurry and why the idea proposed by Carl about Make is not really about having another tool but having a tool that connects multiple services to work together.
Make is a low code/no code tool and does an amazing job of bridging the gap between tools that are cross services, for a very low price point. If there is any tool that is worth your time to explore it is Make/Zapier since this will begin to automate workflows and inspire new ideas constantly.
The learning curve point is valid but totally worth the investment since there are so many other ways that tools like Make will end up contributing to the organization. Honestly, I view my Make scenarios like another employee that works round the clock to ensure everything stays synced and tidy. All of that for $30 a month and some time investment on the front end.
Not arguing at all against your logic, agree with every point you made. I can just hear myself in the discussion from 2 years ago and want to encourage you to explore deeper into the idea Carl is sharing. It goes way deeper than this single solution.
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