A dental office's text to a patient has 160 characters to work with. A long web link can eat half of that, split the message in two and double what it costs. smiles.dental turns that link into a few friendly characters, and keeps the patient's information where it belongs.
This is a real confirmation reply. Switch between the long link a forms system hands out and the smiles.dental link, and watch the message count.
Carriers bill a text by its segments. Up to 160 characters is one. Go one character over and the message is cut into pieces of 153, and each piece is billed. The patient sees one message; you pay for two.
An estimate. Set your own numbers.
A long link that pushes linked texts into a second segment adds about
a year ($0 a month), for the same texts your patients already get. Across many offices, it multiplies.
Text messages are plain text. The phone turns a web address into a tappable link, but it can't hide one behind a word like HERE. The address has to be in the message.
Carriers treat shared public shorteners as a spam signal, so texts get filtered. And every patient's link would pass through someone else's servers.
A friendly, dental domain. Short enough to keep a message in one segment, trusted by carriers, and holding no patient information at all.
smiles.dental is a thin redirect. It never stores a patient's name, visit or answers. Each link is an opaque code that only the dental office's own system can open.
The office's system makes a 10-character code for that patient's page: smiles.dental/cX7Kq2Lm9Pa
smiles.dental reads only the first letter, which office it is, and passes the rest straight on. Nothing is looked up or kept.
The office's own system checks the code and opens the patient's own page. Wrong or expired codes get a polite "not valid".
When a phone fetches a link to draw a preview card, it gets a plain card with the office's name. It never reaches the patient's page, so a preview can't count as opening it.
Any number. Each practice gets its own first letter, and its codes are resolved only by its own systems. Concierge Dental Group is the first.
Not realistically: a code has 6210, about 800 quadrillion, possibilities, and the office's system slows down anyone who tries wrong codes.
The domain is a flat yearly fee and the redirect runs at the edge for fractions of a cent. The saving shows up on every text bill.
The idea behind smiles.dental
smiles.dental came out of a practical question while building a dental office's patient texting: why pay twice for a message because of a link? VaporWeight turned the answer into a small, durable piece of infrastructure. It's short links that fit the 160-character limit, keep patient information off the link domain, stay trusted by carriers, and work for any practice.
That's what VaporWeight does: business-first strategy and software that ships as a working product and keeps working.
VaporWeight is the trade name of Vapor Weight Development LLC.