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by ents 1190 days ago
I had my Wordpress site SMS me a copy of each new contact form just as a convenience for myself via Twilio. Twilios compliance requirements for using SMS has become such a regulatory mess that I deleted my Twilio account today. I am a reasonably bright person and I am unbelievably confused regarding what I am required to do to be in compliance.

I'll just use push notifications from here on out.
5 comments
joshstrange 1190 days ago
Twilio is a dumpster fire. Trying to use it 100% legitimately, respecting "STOP"s, and bending over backwards to comply with every request they've made and they still randomly block us. So not only do they fail at keeping spammers off their service they are actively driving away paying legitimate customers.

I used to love them and they still might be good for a little personal projects (though your story says otherwise) but I would never pick them to use at scale. At one point they said they needed the /exact/ text of every message we were going to send ahead of time to approve before we sent it... Yeah that doesn't work when you send OTPs (yes, yes, I know, we have to have it as a fallback) or a user-specific/transaction-specific url. So pretty much they only thing you could send is generic marketing trash, cool...

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thallium205 1190 days ago
You have to buy a short code to be treated well at Twilio.
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yardstick 1190 days ago
6 digit OTPs? Time to send them every possible combination? ;)
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thesis 1190 days ago
You're not wrong. It's horrible. Want to hear something even more funny?

Twilio is forcing Tollfree Number registation and their current timeline is 6 weeks to approve. Well a week or 2 ago they decided that they wanted more data than what was currently submitted. So everyone is currently being denied and having to resubmit their registrations.

10DLC / Local numbers is madness in and of itself too. Forcing businesses to pay quarterly fees so these poor ol' carriers can have more recurring rev.

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travisjungroth 1190 days ago
https://ntfy.sh/ is free and awesome for this purpose.
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costco 1190 days ago
I have a Twilio app sending 3 texts per week to my parents containing my siblings grades scraped off some difficult to use portal and apparently I have to submit a bunch of documents now. How about targeting the accounts that have actual volume?
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mr337 1190 days ago
I am in the same boat and we are transitioning to dump SMS all together. What a headache to ditch.
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