Looks like AT&T is making some changes, not sure yet how this will affect people using Twilio for Ignition. Has anyone deciphered this yet? I will try and get in touch with Twilio to better understand.
Here’s the super-short version: US cell phone carriers are implementing a system to cut down on text spam, and if you send text messages from a normal 10-digit phone number on Twilio, each carrier may (at their own discretion) drop any messages from you as spam if you don’t register who you are and what sort of messages they should expect from you. Thankfully, all the carriers are using one shared database connecting phone numbers to companies and expected usages. There are small fees associated with setting up and maintaining the database.
If you don’t register, things might just keep working if you only send a very small volume of text messages. But that’s hard to guarantee and may vary based on which phone company your recipient is on. I only calculated the rates for my company’s usage: we send hundreds of messages per day max, and our cost increase comes out to less than $20 per month, and a similarly small fee up front to register. We will also have to provide a bunch of paperwork up front to prove who our business is and provide examples of what sort of messages we plan on sending. We haven’t registered yet, but plan on doing it just to avoid customers NOT receiving messages randomly.
And one more clarification: this only matters if the recipient in the United States (and maybe Canada?). If you only ever send text messages to people in other countries, you can probably ignore it.
I average between 500-1000 per day.
Not so worried about the cost. Did you have to provide the numbers you will be sending to?
We haven’t actually done the registration yet, so most of my information is from sitting through a Twilio webinar on the whole situation. It looks like you don’t have to provide a list of numbers you are sending to. What they want looks to be a list of reasons why you might send a message, with a sample message of each type and a ballpark estimate of how many of each type you will be sending. Some of the example reasons they gave in the webinar were “login MFA code” and “new message notification” and “alarm message” and “new product advertising”. Our Ignition instance is entirely going to be alarm messages, so we’ll likely just give them that one reason.
One bit of confusion I had, they sometimes use the term “campaign” to mean essentially the same thing as where I’m saying “reason why you’re sending a message”. I suspect a lot of it is from the fact that this is all revolving around spam advertising, and they were thinking in terms of campaigns when they wrote it all up. It’s also worth mentioning that different “campaign” types can incur different costs per message. Ads were the most expensive. Practical things like MFA and alarms were the least.
yeah that makes sense. appreciate your feedback. the whole “campaign” terminology is what was confusing to me.