Ask HN: How to send SMS cheaper than Twilio?
Not spam, all double opt-in. Even with 10DLC it's too much $, even on cheap providers like SignalWire. Email to text is unreliable and can't do above certain volumes (unless there's some way to get whitelisted I don't know?)
How can I do this for cheaper?
Here are some numbers:
Pricing varies by carrier but with my carrier mix it is between $0.0065 - $0.007 for 1 message on average. I need to send ~250k each month for now and also need lots of room to send more. These prices are SignalWire which is the cheapest I found so far. Bandwidth looks like the same. I think maybe Teli and Telnyx are a small amount cheaper but not so much.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadBut from what I read, toll free still allows for higher volume.
Quick way to see if you can probably get one: email one of their competitors (a sales email address) and tell them what your average monthly spending with [current vendor] looks like, what your rates with them are, and emphasize that you're otherwise happy with them but feel like it might be worth moving if you can do significantly better on price. If you get back an offer lower than their sticker prices, ask your current vendor to match (assuming you're otherwise happy with them). Even someone who doesn't like and is kinda bad at negotiating can do that.
If they come back with no or trivial movement on price (a 5% discount or something can often be had if you just ask) and trying to sell you on features instead, you're probably too small still. Otherwise, enjoy the savings.
Of course, these same operators offer commercial rates for delivering 'branded' messages at a far higher rates.
PS: funny, HN bolds Cyrillic characters
[1] How to send text messages for free using Python | Use Python to send text messages via email https://www.alfredosequeida.com/blog/how-to-send-text-messag...
[0] https://github.com/ushahidi/SMSSync
If you're sending 250,000 double opt-in SMS messages and can't cover $0.007/message you've got a serious pricing problem
- You'll need TCPA compliant opt-ins for US sending. There's a cottage industry of people who look for vendors that aren't compliant and sue them. The fines range from $500-1500 a SMS or call. Sounds like you've already gotten that covered, but definitely go over the requirements with a lawyer that specializes in it.
- SMS is throttled per a phone number. This is throttled at both the provider and the carrier. That means that even if Twilio sends something at 10am it might not be sent by Verizon until 11am. This absolutely impacts off-hour SMS sending.
- SMS is pricier than email and even at the highest volumes has a relatively high floor per a text. I think the floor might be $0.004X-$0.005. This is offset by having better response rates that email. And as others have mentioned the providers will give you better pricing as your volumes go up, but you'll need to talk to account reps about that.
- At a certain size (1M+/month?), you can also consider integrating directly with the carriers, although that's a longer process to get set up.
- You'll need to manage SMS bounce/spam rates like you would for email bounce spam rates. You'll end up maintaining a block list of known bad phone numbers
Edited for formatting
I think the floor is 0.0025 to 0.003 based on network access fees and depending on carrier. With margin I suppose yes I won't get much cheaper.
If I scale to that level I will look at direct integration, thanks. Do I still need blacklist if I have double opt in and users can opt out? Requiring confirmation would remove the need for that?
Oh and I forgot to mention that if your SMS includes emojis, they get converted to MMS, which typically are more expensive. The companies I worked at, did tests and found that emojis didn't really impact response rates, although its worth testing your specific use-case.
With the double opt in, you probably don't need a blacklist, although you may want one for customers that reply with expletives, etc (assuming you're supporting 2-way).
Technically it's more than just emojis, anything outside of GSM-7 [0] will result in fallback to UCS-2 and you get about half the number of characters per segment.
FWIW Twilio does allow status callbacks so you can see that twilio sent the messaage and when(/if, sometimes they don't) carrier acknowledged delivery success/failure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_03.38#GSM_7-bit_default_al...
This might happen, but it really shouldn't. Sending emoji as utf-16 surrogate pairs in a message marked as UCS-2 generally works, even if it's technically invalid. Of course, using UCS-2 means 70 symbols? max, instead of the 160 you get from a 7-bit GSM encoding (or 140 with an 8-bit encoding, if there's a useful one). Emoji that are one unicode code point will take up two symbols if they need to be sent as surrogage pairs, and if you use any of the combining character based emoji, that's going to use your message length budget real quick. Pushing you into multiple messages or MMS, both of which are expensive.
I guess it'll be another month before I can get another PineNote developer kit delivered to me (between CNY and international shipping). :(
Jokes on whoever stole it. It's a paperweight unless you know what to do with it. A pawn shop wouldn't give them anything for it.
Suppose my business is software for restaurants to notify customers their table is ready via text. How would I mitigate this?
There's also an outside chance that your SMS provider may have an option to pay for faster delivery like email providers do. I don't recall seeing that option, but I have to imagine that at least one provider has this.
The link to where I found the information is below. They don't talk too much about it. They use the example of an OTP so that should work for your use case as well.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_publish-to-pho...
Repeat: SMS is a trash 2FA system
Disclosure: My company was acquired by Sinch. (I can try to intro you to someone on the inside if you'd like.)
Update: I created an account and managed to find pricing, it's almost 2x what I pay other providers.
At a previous employer, the solution was to move off SMS and onto internal messaging via native mobile apps. This will shift your cost focus, but that levels out as the volume of SMS transactions decrease.
My understanding is that fake users can still download an app (or call the API the app would have called), but a phone number is harder to continually spoof/generate.
At 250k it might not meet your needs because whatever phone provider you're using might have a problem. It is possible to pair it to multiple phones as well.
My existing customers are using it to send ~200 messages a day to their subscribers. It supports SMS replies, so you can implement stop codes, depending on your needs.
If you want to discuss it more, feel free to reach out (contact on profile).
Do you know what sort of limits mobile service providers impose on phones?
Personal opinion, you're going to have all kinds of issues with this in the USA.
It has proved useful for him and his customers, and has expanded beyond that, but I don't really know how much to pursue building it further based off risks like this.
Source: We send many millions of messages a month via Twilio.
[0] <"38400 MMS one hour"> https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/4G-Voip-Gateway-LTE-A...
https://snapkit.com/login-kit (scroll down to "Never Pay for SMS Verifications Again")