How to send SMS cheaper than Twilio?

From someone who's done a fair amount of SMS sending here are some things to think about.

- 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

That is a huge number of SMS messages...what on earth would you need that many for with out the revenue to back it?

We purchased a shortcode with Twilio for 3k a quarter, then with their bulk pricing discounts, we are able to send text messages with a 70% discount off the ticket price.

Source: We send many millions of messages a month via Twilio.

Have you tried talking to a sales rep from Twilio or one of the other providers? Sometimes they can figure out a discount or credit to keep you. Usually they will at least try.

You should speak to Twilio and Sinch since they're now the two main players after their acquisitions of Syniverse and SAP respectively. They definitely have pricing power and should be able to help out.

Disclosure: My company was acquired by Sinch. (I can try to intro you to someone on the inside if you'd like.)

You could set up a dedicated Android phone with SMSSync [0]. It isn't maintained but I use it for my own personal use and would think it could scale up to meet this kind of demand. I don't know the legality of using a cell phone service for this kind of service though, might violate their terms of service.

[0] https://github.com/ushahidi/SMSSync

If you're willing to commit to a significant monthly spend the providers will offer lower rates. Contact several of them and collect competing bids.

I've been working on http://parrot.dev, it uses an Android phone to enable sending messages from an API, while it's still new it's currently in use with a collection of customers.

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).

Dealing with this now, agree that if you're not generating revenue to cover the costs, you're barking up the wrong tree. Yes, SMS is easier for the users, but it's also not very secure. And that impacts the use cases of your platform.

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.

I'm not sure but I've always suspected you could get cheaper if you went with a modem like this[0] and prepaid sims. You'd have to test for shadowbans and swap out bad cards, but I bet you could get it to work. However how much cheaper this is once you factor in time running around buying prepaid sims? it's probably not worth it.

[0] <"38400 MMS one hour"> https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/4G-Voip-Gateway-LTE-A...

You could integrate "Verify With Snapchat" and push users towards that instead (requires users to have a Snapchat account)

https://snapkit.com/login-kit (scroll down to "Never Pay for SMS Verifications Again")

You can try to send sms using sms gateways https://muhammadraza.me/2018/Sending-SMS-using-Python/

Tangential, but have you thought about offering customers the option for emails instead? I'd much rather give you my email address, I'd much rather receive email, and it will cost you less as well!

To do high volume SMS, I think you need a dedicated, business toll free number so they can easily track and block your account if you start spamming. This is the "white listing" process.

You might want to fix your title if you can still edit (sp).

Are you paying listed pricing or do you have a discounted enterprise contract? That might be a starting place.

Have you thought about buying a cheap cell phone with a plan? You can turn an Android phone into an SMS gateway.

I have this bookmarked from a few weeks ago found on HN [1].

[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...