[lapsedacademic]

Rate limiting.

About a decade back, we used to use the email approach at a non-profit I volunteered at. Annually we would need to send a bunch of texts of a short time period. Think "once a year event".

Eventually we had to stop using that solution. Most texts went through, but there were enough failures that we had to switch to twilio. I can't remember when; I guess 5 or 10 years ago? Getting old.

(We didn't immediately switch to twilio. There was one year during which we used my personal phone to send out an obscene number of texts from my personal phone number. Figured out that was a bad idea pretty quick.)

[Wingy]

What went wrong with using your personal phone? Was your provider upset?

[lapsedacademic]

Two issues:

1. Latency. We really needed messages to go out to everyone all at once.

2. My personal phone became unusable for the rest of the event because people thought that number was a general event organizer contact mechanism. This was a big deal because I was a key member of the operations staff and really needed my phone to be useful.

Solving (1) and (2) was certainly doable, but twilio solved the problem for us and I had higher impact IT stuff to be working on for the org.