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Ask HN: Alternatives to Twilio for SMS?

11 points by daenz ↗ HN
I'm having atrocious SMS deliverability through Twilio. All of my recipients are OPT-IN only and 100% vetted (the explicitly sign up to receive messages). The message contents are never spam or marketing, only alerts associated with my customers accounts, and my OPT-OUT rate is very low. Yet Twilio keeps telling me that the phone carriers must be filtering my messages. They have no problem continuing to charge me though!

I have a paid Twilio support account, but they have been awful with their response times. I'm at my breaking point with Twilio. Are there any alternatives that you've used successfully?

11 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 27.9 ms ] thread
iSloth
MessgeBird might be worth a go, however I’d also look at tyntec, personally had great results with them before.
toast0
There are a ton of alternate SMS providers and aggregators. All of them will tell you that they've got 100% direct routes and that they're the best, and they're all lying. :P

If you have a feedback loop to indicate successful receipt of messages, the best thing to do is to use multiple providers and track success by destination carrier and route to whatever provider is working best at the time. If you run graphs on this, you'll find out lots of interesting things --- like when one aggregator goes down, you can see which other aggregators are using them.

I don't want to endorse any providers, but if you're looking for messages to the US, the list of partners from the shortcode registry is a decent place to start https://www.usshortcodes.com/partners/find-partner

tehwhale810
We use bandwidth and really love it. Also offers some neat functionality such as text enabling existing phone numbers.

Bandwidth is also one of the underlying provider for a HUGE number of telecom companies. We switched from Twilio and haven’t looked back.

toomuchtodo
Bandwidth.com powers Google Voice coincidentally.
mirrortits
Telnyx, MessageBird have both been pretty reliable for me.