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> In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service.

> They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not.

This is an industry issue. You can request SMS delivery indications, and the carrier can send you delivery indications while dropping the messages. Or an intermediary might do the same thing. There's no way to ensure you only get delivery confirmations from the phone, so the delivery confirmation doesn't mean much. (Often, requesting confirmation results in better deliverability though)

If you can track delivery yourself, because a user is expected to use the message right away (verification), you should really be running multiple providers and picking the provider to use based on success and costs.

All the sms providers will tell you that they have global coverage, only use direct routes, and that they're the best. But they're all lieing. I ran a global SMS (and voice) verification service with 5 SMS providers, and when a major provider had a big outage, their success graph went to zero, but every other provider's graph dropped significantly too --- they all had some routes through that provider.

Yeah the underlying issue is that telecoms networks naturally trend towards monopoly. So often times there will be only one route that is cost effective / reliable to deliver traffic.

I'm with you on the support being sub-par, but the whole vetting brands (A2P) thing has nothing to do with Twilio at all. It's entirely forced by an industry group called The Campaign Registry. I don't know the last time you tried to create a brand in Twilio but they support the entire process in their UI these days, but the nightmarish API you're talking about is entirely an invention of TCR, not Twilio.

> They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. They implement the most bureaucratic nightmarish processes for vetting brands which are impossible to do via the UI, and must only be done through broken/bizarre API calls that were clearly cobbled together without any design considerations. Maybe you get it all to work, but then after deliverability customer complaints a month later, you hear from Twilio that something broke on their end and you need to re-submit the vetting.

We have had the same experience. Takes 15-20 api calls at least. And you have to wait unknown amounts of times before you can continue at several points in the process. Their paid support has been worse than useless, they just cost us more time.

Competitors to Twilio only require 3 calls per customer. In comparison, Twilio's process is utter insanity.