HACKER Q&A
📣 abound

What are you doing about A2P 10DLC for hobby projects?


I use Twilio for SMS and MMS in a random assortment of personal projects: alerting for a home server, chess over MMS, notifications to/from family members solving puzzle games, etc.

I've been receiving the various Twilio emails about A2P 10DLC [1], but have mostly ignored them until now as it seemed like things were still in flux. Now that the dust has settled, it looks like I'd need to register as a "Sole Proprietor", pay $4 for a "Brand", pay $15 for "Campaign Vetting", and then pay $2/month for that "Campaign" in order to continue sending messages (mostly to myself) the way I do at present.

It's not necessarily that the cost is prohibitive, it's more so than I don't really want to pay $2/month for a service I'm sometimes not using at all.

As far as alternatives, I looked into a few different options:

- Using a toll-free number [2] - This requires verification too, but via a different process. It looks like toll-free numbers in the US cost $2.15/month.

- Using a different notification system - I already have a (Twilio) SendGrid subscription, I could just move SMS + MMS-based services to email, and I really should use a PagerDuty-type service for my homelab alerts anyway.

- "Special Use Cases" for A2P 10DLC [3] - "Low-volume hobby projects" didn't make the cut as a special use case.

- Move to another SMS + MMS API - Since A2P 10DLC is an initiative of US carriers (as far as I can tell), all Twilio competitors (e.g. [4]) have to offer more or less the same flow (campaigns + external vetting) and pricing.

- Build an alternative service - Not a particularly realistic option, but I don't see why one couldn't (attempt to) make a campaign on behalf of all hobby projects and offer to enforce limits on their behalf (low volumes, perhaps a phone-number allowlist per project with low quotas, etc), and have that (and your internal business practices/controls) go through the vetting process and get approved by carriers.

[1] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260800720410-What-is-A2P-10DLC-

[2] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360038172934-Information-and-best-practices-for-using-Toll-Free-SMS-and-MMS-in-the-US-and-Canada

[3] https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402972441243-Special-Use-Cases-for-A2P-10DLC#h_01F9J4T5823K3ENEDAN7WM70Z7

[4] https://www.plivo.com/docs/privatebeta/sms/10dlc/quickstart/

  👤 mdorazio Accepted Answer ✓
I use Twilio for a friends & family only project, and just this week jumped through the hoops to register. I'm willing to suck it up and pay the $2/month because I understand the purpose of this whole thing is to reduce spam. I hate the spam texts I get more than I hate paying $2 so for me it's worth it. However, I understand your reluctance and also considered (and might eventually switch to) something other than SMS, maybe back to good old emails or if I get everyone onto a single messaging platform I'd use an API into that.
👤 aag01
Why not run it over something like Telegram? The Bot API works well for such use cases.