If you live in the US you likely have a lengthy contract associated with your mobile phone purchase. However in many countries, including Ireland, pre-pay credit is a popular (and much cheaper) way of paying for your calls and data. Many operators offer deals that give you free data/calls/text for up to a month after you top-up by a certain amount, however once that month is up your credit is quickly eaten up by their relatively high out-of-package rates. It's not uncommon to see all your remaining credit disappear a single day after you leave the package coverage - and even if you top-up right away to protect your credit, there's no point keeping unused credit on your mobile account.
There are a couple of good ways to spend this credit while you are still covered by the top-up package and get the most from your money, but if you don't need €20 worth of apps or music every month you'll quickly run out of ideas. Alchemy is an android project that will allow you to turn that money into something good - by donating it to charities via SMS services. Alchemy is currenly only available in the android app store, but stay tuned for more!
Alchemy Privacy Policy
Neither the Alchemy App nor the server that powers it collect any personal information of any kind about you as a user. No donations are recorded outside of your own phone (however they may be by LikeCharity). A small amount of data can be revealed in items such as crash and server logs, such as the type of phone you have or your IP address. This data is only used anonomyously to fix bugs and improve performance of the app. Alchemy is open source and you can verify its behaviour for yourself at github
.Alchemy - Contributions
Alchemy is free and open-source, published under the MIT license. Contributions to the Alchemy App or its server are very welcome on github. You can find the list of contributors on there too.
Alchemy is essentially a wrapper for the charity donation service provided by LikeCharity and their API. According to their website, Texts cost €2, €4 or €6. Charities receive a minimum of €1.80 of €2, €3.60 of €4 and €5.40 of €6. Service Provider: LIKECHARITY. Helpline: 0766805278.