Email and SMS sharing
Consent, costs and credits for sharing
The consent asked of the guest, what each email and SMS costs, the free quotas and how to avoid unpleasant surprises.
Feature being rolled out. Until pay-as-you-go is turned on for your account, no send is counted. Prices are published at shop.boothx.org/plans.
Sending a photo by email or SMS means processing personal data (the guest's address or number) and using a service that costs us money (the send). This article explains how BoothX handles both.
The guest's consent
Before each send, the guest ticks a consent checkbox, never ticked by default. The text states:
- what they will receive (their photo, and nothing else);
- who sends the message (the event, through BoothX);
- that their address or number is used only for this send.
Until the box is ticked, the send button stays disabled.
No hidden marketing
The address entered to receive a photo must not be used for anything else (newsletter, advertising) without a second, separate consent. If your client wants to collect contacts, use the contest, which has a separate newsletter checkbox.
Custom text
You can adapt the consent text to your event, without removing the essentials: purpose of the send, who is responsible, retention period. Have your client review it if they are the data controller. See Guests' rights.
What a send costs
| Service | Default monthly free quota | Beyond that |
|---|---|---|
| 100 emails | Credits per email. | |
| SMS | None | Credits per SMS, from the first one. |
| Sharing bandwidth | 5 GB | Credits per volume. |
| Gallery and cloud storage | 200 photos, 1 GB | Credits per photo or per volume. |
Quotas may change; the ones that apply to your account are shown in the app's usage panel. Credit prices and the unit cost of each service are published at shop.boothx.org/plans.
An email or SMS send contains a link to the photo hosted online: it therefore also uses a little storage and bandwidth.
Estimate before the event
For an event, sharing usage is calculated as follows:
emails = guests × share who choose emailSMS = guests × share who choose SMSemail credits = max(0, emails − remaining email quota) × email unit costSMS credits = SMS × SMS unit cost
A complete example, including the online gallery, is detailed in Estimate the cost of an event.
Stay in control
- Offer email only if the budget is tight: the free quota often covers a small event.
- Keep SMS for events where it really adds something, and include its cost in your quote.
- Check your balance the day before in the usage panel.
- Watch the queue during the event: a spike in sends shows up right away.
When credits run out
Only the service concerned stops, never the booth:
- the Receive by SMS (or by email) option is no longer offered to guests; the QR code stays on screen;
- sends already in the queue and rejected by our servers switch to Failed: out of credits; after topping up, retry them;
- shooting, printing and all local modes carry on normally.
Top-ups are done on our website, never in the app. See Free quotas and credits.
Offline
Offline, BoothX accepts sends within the quota and credits it knew about at the last connection, and counts them when the network comes back. A send is never counted twice. See The offline send queue.
Billing your client
You can pass the cost of sharing on in your quote:
- a flat fee for “sending photos by SMS” based on your estimate;
- or a per-send cost, based on the event's send counter after the job.
Frequently asked questions
Does a guest who sends their photo twice pay twice? Two separate requests make two sends, so they are counted twice. The same send retried by the queue is counted only once.
Does the QR code use credits? Displaying the QR code is free. The gallery it opens uses storage and bandwidth, with a free quota.
Can I turn off email and SMS completely? Yes, in the event's sharing settings. Nothing is then sent or counted.