Ask HN: How to do transactional SMS as a bootstrapped or startup company?
Now, ì do not want to get into Tier 2 also as the API approach ad DX is not available compared to how it is with Tier1. Also I don’t want to risk my customers phone numbers with providers who do not have good support and privacy handling features.
There are couple or more apps that I am building where I like the simplicity of SMS. I don’t have to request for push notification permissions, I do not need an app on the stores to push relevant info and updates. Most basic User signup. If user does not want to use the phone, then maybe the service is not for them. And then occasional updates on Direct messages on the platform. (Order completion, delivery instructions, Direct Messages from users etc.) I see most of these as small messages only if they ever did take actions on the platform.
However, based on my initial calculations, even with 1000 users signing up. Allowing SMS code input and DM messages or info messages, these can reach a number of close to 300 to 500 Euros or Dollars monthly. This is including alpa numeric sending options. Where I do not allow messages to be replied back.
When I started programming SMS was the cheapest option. Now I feel it has become expensive However I still see small and big companies using these options. 1. Are there other alternatives I am not seeing? 2. Since my volume of push and sending is low, I do not want to ask users push notification and scare them away 3. What other options can we see here.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadBut when you start sending sms internationally, the costs can explode.
As memory serves, twilio charges about 10c to send an sms to Germany, for example.
I run a bootstrapped and somewhat successful monitoring saas and we literally keep a running balance of every users sms cost (as reported directly by twilio) and every user has a $ cap that resets monthly.
By way of example, my company is sending ~1.5M segments per month at a cost of a couple tens of thousands (I can't say exactly, obviously). This boils down to the fees that I mentioned, international examples that you gave, as well as the differences between SMS and MMS messaging where it's not always clear what counts as MMS (multi-byte encoding, anything with an attachment or URL, >N segments per message where N changes based on delivering carrier, etc.) It gets... Wonky.
Did you evaluate going all in on Toll Free texting perchance?
That said your concern is incredibly valid and it’s why SMS needs to remain somewhat expensive. Could you imagine if SMS was as cheap as email? Holy shit the spam volume.
I ignore texts from people I don't know (not in my address book).
I am pretty solidly in camp A, I will read every text message that hits my phone but if it's spam or something like that I will just get pissed off and remember not to give that company/person any money ever. But I still read it.
At what service? How did you come up with the number $300-500.
The prices will differ greatly depending on what countries you send to. (e.g. Twilio is $0.0079/sms to the US, but $0.0578/sms to Sweden)
SMS as a 2FA method is flawed (but better than no 2FA). I’d push users into more secure options. Doing so can also lower SMS cost.
As part of those regulations you have to deal with opt-in and opt-out formalities. It's a crime in the US to send a text message to someone in an automated way that they did not directly and concretely ask for. Doing so can result in heavy fines. Similarly if they opt out using any of a number of both standard and non-standard methods, you must comply with that even if it impacts their ability to use other parts of your system. You can work around that with multiple numbers, each attached to a different campaign of a different use-case, but do that too much and they'll get you for "snow shoeing" and it comes with more and more fines.
And on... And on... And on... This is my literal day-to-day job. I can say with relative confidence that if you are working with a small number of people, just use push notifications. It's actually easier.
Also, if you must go with SMS for whatever reason, your tier-1 providers, as you put it, will handle a lot of that regulatory guff for you (for a price of course), so don't look too far for other providers. If you want to own your own registered brand and campaign with TCR, then a good option is Telgorithm, although your integration complexity will go up pretty drastically.
Lastly, check your costs. Pricing for SMS is way more complicated than what the marketing language on provider websites seem to indicate. Talk with people doing similar things and get the real answers, and budget accordingly.
I had forgotten the production go-live for critical functions for our client got pushed back like 6 months due to short codes getting approved at seemingly random schedules until you mentioned the approval process. I do not miss working with SMS.
I get so many spam SMS messages on my US number, despite periodically registering my number on the do-not-call list. What's the best way to report numbers so that they get maximally penalized?
SMS is so incredibly locked down and rate limited at this point you shouldn't reasonably expect to send much more than 1 SMS per user with an activation code if you want to do phone number verification.
Unless you've got revenue or some sort of long term value associated with your messages, you've got to use them sparingly. If you have huge volume, you can get lower prices, all the way down to zero cost in some cases, but as a small user, you're going to pay real money, especially internationally.
You can try messing around with abusing a consumer account's free messaging, but you'll hit limits quickly.
If possible, have a plan to use multiple providers, monitoring delivery, and switching traffic as needed. Every provider in this space will tell you they have global coverage, that they have direct routes and don't use aggregators, and they're all lieing. You need flexible routing to manage this, and SMS is a very simple API target, so it's easy to integrate alternatives; there are a lot of country specific requirements for commercial messaging, so the providers are providing a real service, but it's replicatable and the tier 1 group is big, although you've missed several and included some I wouldn't count as tier 1.
That seems like a silly hill to die on. How is SMS any different than an email in simplicity?
It is a very silly hill to die on. Phone numbers are garbage. Difficult to change (banks/govt/emergency contact/ etc), difficult to mask (ala no “hide my email” alternative), and extremely invasive (no ability to customise notifications per sender/caller). So yeah, it’s no wonder people are becoming more and more wary of giving their phone number out.
When the alternatives such as email and push are so simple, it really doesn’t make sense why the OP is willing to lose potential customers because of some weirdly held opinion.
AT&T number@txt.att.net
Boost Mobile number@sms.myboostmobile.com
Cricket Wireless number@sms.cricketwireless.net
Google Fi number@msg.fi.google.com
MetroPCS number@mymetropcs.com
Sprint number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
T-Mobile number@tmomail.net
US Cellular number@email.uscc.net
Verizon number@vtext.com
Virgin Mobile number@vmobl.com
This used Twilio. Users sent an SMS to Twilio. Twilio then made an HTTP request to our server, which queued the message for the Teletype machine and replied to the sender with an SMS message. This is what Twilio calls inbound SMS - text comes in, reply goes back in the HTTP reply. You can't send unsolicited SMS via the inbound system. It's a unit transaction.
This now has to be registered as an "advertising campaign". There's an additional per-month fee, and a vetting process. You have to have an identifiable company. I could go through all that to comply, but steampunk is pretty much over and we stopped doing cons when COVID hit.
The spam industry effectively defines a "transactional message" as someone messaged in once, so now you can spam them forever. ("Now you can buy more of that thing you bought last year!") Regulation now works on that basis. So even services that are inherently one request/reply are regulated as "ad campaigns."
This is why we can't have nice things.
[1] https://vimeo.com/124065314
"Anyone can be punk, but to be steampunk you need a good tailor and access to a machine shop."
1 to 1 conversations where the user is contacting you is hard to argue as anything but P2P, you would be best off with a P2P texting enablement provider or toll free texting.
After 4 months of run around, we gave up on Twilio and SMS. I’m furious with Twilio and will never use them again.
You can opt out by using a toll free number to send SMS (which is 10DLC exempt), use a P2P carrier (read: Not Twilio), or use a carrier that will let you ride their 10DLC registration (which was what Twilio was probably doing if you don't have an LLC). Not all are as awful to deal with as Twilio!
So we started really driving people to push notifications, but users liked the text messages. Especially if they believe your messages are important. As the gateways become more unreliable, users became frustrated and weren't interested in switching over to push notifications.
I did all the research you did, and while we were profitable taking on SMS was going to become a major cost. I couldn't do it. So we took these steps:
1. Immediately stopped providing SMS gateway texts to all new customers. This stopped the expectation that text messages were included. These customers were told we only had push notifications.
2. We went with Twilio and with our decade of data we had a good idea how many text messages per customer. We begin offering a new package that included text messages. We really didn't mark up the price at all, we just covered costs.
When a customer would complain about only have push notification option, we sold them the text message package. When the SMS gateways were unreliable for a customer, we sold them the text message package.
The product is still sold like this today.
Professional plaintiffs will eventually sue you for minor TCPA violations, and will not be cheap to resolve.
It costs money because it's valuable. Sign up for one of the Tier 1 services and move on, if you can't justify the cost you need to reassess your product and/or its pricing.
I'd look into country specific providers. They tend to be much cheaper, and the APIs often won't be terrible. SMS has the advantage of being fairly straightforward too (where say, payments is not).
I've used Twilio and I've used a local alternative, and there was really very little difference in practice for a startup level of reliability and feature set. The trade-off with local providers is time, and the bootstrap trade-off is time instead of money, so they're well aligned.
Most countries outside US/CAN use WhatsApp as the preferred method of messaging, which is considerably cheaper. https://www.twilio.com/en-us/whatsapp/pricing
There’s another great example in the comments to email a phone number of you know what the provider is. Porting has made guessing this a little harder.
I only used them for DID hosting and SIP trunking/local call termination.