Comment by toast0
2 years ago
Carriers that run their own messaging infrastructure can allow for direct connections from 3rd parties, and set the price per message to whatever they want, including zero.
For something like Twitter where you could post by SMS, the balance of traffic might have been such that giving Twitter free outbound SMS was balanced by the charges incurred by customers sending to Twitter's shortcode. Or it might just be balanced by increased customer happiness when they can use the product more effectively.
If the carrier doesn't run their own messaging infra, they might be paying their IT provider on a per message basis, and might not be able or willing to set the messaging rate to zero.
For a use case where SMS is used to show control of a phone number, getting a zero cost direct route is a harder sell, but it can happen if the routing through aggregators is poor and the carrier is concerned about that, or if there's some other larger agreement in play.
If you require global connectivity, managing hundreds of carrier APIs, contracts, etc seems like major overhead. Also, there are companies whose only purpose for existing is providing messaging, like Twilio, are they just...not doing this or do the carriers just not play ball? In that case, why would the carriers agree to sell to you at a discount?
Aggregators do some of this, and they can negotiate pricing to some degree, but a carrier is unlikely to intentionally give them zero cost traffic, and even if they do, they're not going to pass that through at zero cost.
I ran the engineering side of carrier integrations at WhatsApp. Carriers wanted to sell data plans with special pricing for data with WA and use WA branding in advertising, because it attracted customers that might later convert to a bigger general purpose data plan. As part of that, we would ask for zero rated SMS to their customers for verification. When it was available, it was generally faster and higher success vs sending messages through an aggregator.
We also had some, usually small, carriers approach us asking us to set up direct routes to them for verification, because their customers would not always receive our messages when we sent through an aggregator. Early in my career at WA, we would just send these carriers to our aggregator contacts, and often things would get linked up and then we'd still pay $/message but it would work better. As we got a little bigger and built support for direct routes anyway, it was usually not too hard to set up a direct connection and then there'd be no cost for that carrier. Messing around with IPSEC VPNs and SMPP isn't fun and the GSMA SOAP messaging APIs are way worse, but once you get the first couple implementations done, it becomes cookie cutter (and FB had built way better tools for this, and a 24/7 support team, so I never had to be up, on the phone with telco peeps at 3 am kicking racoon or whatever ipsec daemon we were running until it finally connected)
Can you say what ordinary (non-discounted) pricing was like, per message? At least in the US, most carriers did I and, believe, still do operate free SMTP -> SMS gateways. They worked okay, although they resulted in oddly formatted messages.
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Thanks very much for sharing your experience and detail! This kind of info is what I was looking for and is super helpful.