Comment by aag | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aag | Hacker News Reader

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For a tiny personal project (delivering alarms for calendar entries to my Light Phone 2), I used Twilio for several years. I was always impressed by how easy and cheap they made it to implement SMS delivery, even for a hobbyist.

Late last ever, they started sending me warning notes insisting that I fill out all kinds of paperwork for my "business" if I wanted to continue sending SMS messages. None of the paperwork made any sense for a hobbyist, but they insisted. It was clear that this requirement was coming from outside of Twilio, so I wonder whether it was the result of earlier discussions with the FCC. Since I don't use the Light Phone any more (couldn't do without a camera), I just turned off SMS delivery rather than deal with all the new bureaucracy. But I still use them for another hack: I can call a Twilio number and leave myself a message, which they will then deliver to a hook on my web server, along with a transcription.

I'm impressed with Twilio technically, and I can sympathize. I wouldn't want to be caught between the FCC and a bunch of SMS spammers, especially if the spammers were customers.

This was due to the 3 big US wireless carrier's colluding to form the Campaign Registry, which is trying to force any business users of SMS to pay a verification fee ($50 iirc) and monthly fees ($ to $$ per month) just so you can send SMS for business reasons, even if it's person to person traffic where your just replying to your clients that texted you.

Had the FCC implemented something like this the rules would be much more consistent and the fee structure would not be so exorbitant, but instead the big 3 have formed a cartel to attempt to control SMS messages in the USA.

Not to mention TCR just raised (last november) their monthly prices for the starter brand campaign from $0.75 to $2.00 and included a $4.00 setup fee (which was previously $0) for each starter brand. On top of that they added all kinds of additional registration paperwork for the law-abiding SMS sender. It's infuriating how this organization exists to extort legitimate businesses, and yet we still all receive massive amounts of spam.

TCR also recently introduced a one-time $15 A2P Campaign use case registration fee for vetting the messaging campaign details.

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I wish businesses were banned from sending any sort of SMS ever for any fee, but this is better than nothing.

I would love to know if TCR has actually made a meaningful impact to stop spam.

Doubtful,it seems spammers just moved to toll free or moved to P2P routes.

TFNs require registration now too, as of sometime last year.

I had a similar setup with Twilio, I switched to using Signal via signalbot framework. It’s a fairly straightforward process and it runs on my Pi in a docker container.I can even send it attachments and it will archive them for me. Sky is the limit.

https://pypi.org/project/signalbot/

The sms functionality is great, their API and UI design is awful. I wish there was a decent alternative.

I haven't used them in a couple of years, but their API version was still something like "2013" and was not intuitive or functional

P.S.: I hate robocalls, too.

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