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Comment by jijji | Hacker News Reader

I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages, then they wanted you to describe what you're using it for and you had to pay money to fill out a form to tell them what you're using the text messages for.... then they would deny that and then you basically can't use twilio, or pay them to fill out the form again so they can deny you again.... This is for outbound SMS (payment notifications to customers) so I wound up writing an Android application that runs on a phone that just sends out SMS messages using an API talking to a server..... I'm paying $8 a month to Tello now which is about 1/5 the amount of money that I was paying to twilio so I'm glad that I switched..... but I think they really screwed up recently.

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This is likely because of industry regulations around A2P (application-to-person ) messaging that had a due date of August 31, 2023.

It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected.

https://help.salesmessage.com/en/articles/6650461-changes-to...

https://www.telgorithm.com/news/10dlc-registration-required/

https://support.referrizer.com/support/solutions/articles/10...

> It's not just Twilio, you would have experienced this with nearly every SMS API provider. Across the different vendors I work with, I received numerous emails from each one advising me to come into compliance or risk my messages being rejected.

From what I can tell, the telcos aren't performing any enforcement, even tho the deadlines and extensions are long past. Not to say they won't but the endeavor seems to have a stall vibe going on.

Some of that might be related to having major mass-campaign requirements placed on small biz who occasionally send a handful of texts (often non-sales) from their workstation phone apps.

At least I hope this is why it has stalled. Sending a few texts during a customer service session shouldn't be regulated as if it were a blast of 1M SMS ads.

Had a good experience regarding this with one of the SMS API providers - Message Central.

The blocking was 100% not Twilio’s fault it was 100% bad actors and pressure from congress. Also we have three major carriers now in the US they needed to act fast in August since congress was going to go back I session in September to force this. So the carriers wanted to be able to say to congress see we are already taking care of the spam issue … see https://www.campaignregistry.com/. The single monopoly in charge of the regulations

> I used twilio for years until in August of 2023 they started blocking all my text messages,

New telco industry texting requirements came into play. In short, US biz are required to register with The Campaign Registry and pay regular fees if they want to do any (as in 1+) software text comms.

It can be onerous for not-large biz. Twillo took point early-on (inserting themselves into the administration, IIRC) and Twillo then got a lot of heat from their users - even tho the requirements originated from the telcos.

Somewhat surprising/disappointing to me was that now you can't even send SMS to a number that initiates the conversation--this would seem to be a pretty clear opt-in indicator. Because of that, I couldn't find a way (through Twilio) to get around the registration requirements just to send SMS to my own number for development purposes to try some things out. The registration workflow and UX is also comically terrible and confusing.

It's a shame as I think there are some legit non-spam use cases for SMS as a messaging platform, but considering you now seemingly need to pay, fill out a bunch of annoying/buggy forms, and wait for days to who-knows-how-long before sending a single message in development, I'd say it's been pretty well destroyed as anything a dev would ever play around with. Who's going to do all that before writing a line of code?

I think your frustration is reasonable. The telcos are favoring major marketing companies by unreasonably imposing big biz requirements on small biz and indy devs (through platforms like Twillo)

That bad UX is being supplied by The Campaign Registry org.

I do recall Twillo performing TCR's tasks in the beginning (applications, registration, etc) but only until TCR was spun up. It's all on TCR now.

The time I wasted waiting for twilio to deny my reasoning for sending an SMS message to One of my customers, paying them to do this mind you, was about the same amount of time it took me to write an Android application that sent out SMS messages by reading from a custom API on one of my servers... I probably should have done that in the beginning it would have been a lot less money in the long run.

They serve big businesses now. They don't want small players coming in with potentially abusive behavior. Twilio worked hard to build its relationships with carriers and doesn't want to be dragged down by spam.

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