Am I missing something? Is programatically sending SMS globally this bad?

> am i missing something here? I have a rails app, and it sends text messages (booking confirmations). It happens to use AWS SNS for that. I noticed today that not all messages are going through (it sends, but not all will be received). E.g. all +1 (US) numbers don't receive the actual messages! (shocking!). Same for UK and a bunch of other places. I set up SNS logging to observe what's going on. But I can't beleieve this. I'll have to do some various registrations for things for each country to satisfy their requirements and make any code adjustments necessary so SNS uses those attributes and the messages start arriving. But taking a step back, that's a lot of fucking work, and I wonder if using SNS was a mistake - are there similar services that don't require you to do that, e.g. so all that registration BS is done for you and you just provide a number and a message and it sends?

Answer:

> The ugly thing you’ve discovered is that “send SMS to arbitrary phone numbers worldwide” is no longer really a single global service.

Sharing to HN in case someone can solve this (i.e. an API that takes 2 arguments: a message and a phone number and it 'just sends').

There was a time around 2016-2019 where this was possible with Twilio. I went from nothing to sending real SMS messages to real numbers in under an hour.

Then it scaled, became popular, and got ruined.

Post-Covid, SMS abuse went through the roof, they locked it down with legislation and bureaucrazy, and now it's nothing but pain and suffering trying to send SMS. Twilio/Sendgrid used to be fantastic. And now it's a massive sinkhole of your time, money, and sanity. I've not used SNS before, and obviously anything AWS-related has its own unnecessary complexity. But I promise Twilio can't be much better. Feels like they re-write the entire user interface every year just for kicks and giggles. Good luck finding anything, or remember where anything is.