We built inst8 to give every business affordable two-way SMS.

For years we ran a small marketing agency out of Auckland. SMS sat at the centre of how our clients talked to their customers. Appointment reminders, lead follow-ups, recovery campaigns, win-back flows. Nothing exotic, and nothing that should have been hard to deliver.

Except in New Zealand, it was. Twilio, the default that every CRM points you at, doesn't offer two-way SMS here at all. Same story across much of the world outside North America. The few providers that did support real two-way messaging in our region were charging $0.05 to $0.09 per message, and many times that across parts of Europe. A single mid-sized client sending 5,000 SMS a month was burning $300 to $450 in messaging fees alone, before our agency fee, before HighLevel, before anything else.

Bulk SMS resellers were cheaper per message but couldn't do two-way. Self-hosted gateways needed engineers we didn't have. CRM-native messaging tools were either US-only or just Twilio with a different logo on the invoice. Every option seemed designed for a market that was already paying too much and didn't know it.

So we did the dumb-sounding thing: bought an Android phone, put a local SIM in it, and started writing the software to make it talk to HighLevel.

The idea wasn't novel. The bit nobody had bothered to do properly was the production-grade work around it: native CRM integrations, smart queuing, SIM health monitoring, multi-device load balancing, a dashboard a non-engineer could actually run.

We built it for ourselves first. One Android phone, sitting on a shelf in our office, plugged into HighLevel, sending real two-way SMS to our clients for a fraction of what we'd been paying. It worked. Then other agencies in our network asked if they could use it. Then their clients did. The demand stopped looking like a favour and started looking like a product.

We sent the first message through the production gateway on 23 April 2024. Same DNA as the prototype (Android phone, real SIM, cloud gateway) but built for scale: smart queuing to keep SIMs healthy inside carrier fair-use limits, multi-device load balancing, native integrations with HighLevel, HubSpot, Zoho and Zapier, an Android app you install once and forget, and a dashboard with real-time reporting on every message.

Pricing followed the principle that drove the build in the first place: flat fee, no per-message gouging. $47 a month for one device. $497 a month for unlimited devices. No metering, no surprise invoices, no A2P compliance gauntlet.

Two years later, the platform moves a message every two seconds around the clock. The busiest day on record was 7 May 2026, with 46,911 messages going through the gateway. Nearly a quarter of all traffic is inbound replies. That's what real two-way looks like.