Guides

How this actually works

The parts of messaging that are easy to get subtly wrong: what a segment is, where the rate limit really lives, why an accepted message is not a delivered one. Written from what the platform does, not from what would sound good.

4 min

Bring your own account

The platform has no provider account of its own. That one design decision changes who owns the numbers, who holds the quota, and who appears on the invoice.

Read the guide →
5 min

SMS segments and what you actually pay for

SMS is billed per segment, not per message. Whether your text fits in one segment depends on the character set it needs — and on the encoding you set on the connection.

Read the guide →
7 min

Opt-out handling

Opt-out is two halves: the suppression record, and the check that runs before a marketing message is handed to the provider. Both run through one shared normalisation, which is the part that usually breaks.

Read the guide →
5 min

Reading a delivery receipt

A receipt is a sequence of states, not a verdict. Treating an intermediate one as final is the most common way a sending dashboard ends up lying to you.

Read the guide →
5 min

Pacing, quotas and why we queue

Every connection carries a send rate. The platform queues to that rate instead of firing as fast as a provider will accept, because the fastest way to get throttled is to send at the speed that causes it.

Read the guide →
4 min

Routing and failover

Routes are ordered by priority and weighted within a connection. The point of the arrangement is that a provider rejecting sends degrades into slower sending, not into silence.

Read the guide →
4 min

Who decides whether a message is marketing

The platform asks you to declare what kind of message you are sending instead of inferring it from the text. That one field decides whether the opt-out gate applies — and the honesty of the declaration is yours.

Read the guide →
4 min

A timeout is not a failure

Sending is accepted asynchronously and there is no de-duplication key. Retrying a request you are unsure about sends a second message and bills for it.

Read the guide →
4 min

Two endpoints that look alike and are not

Delivery receipts and inbound replies are different endpoints, configured in different places in your provider’s console. Configure only the receipt URL and opt-out handling stops — silently, with no error anywhere.

Read the guide →
3 min

Getting a number back

A recipient who opted out can opt back in. The platform deactivates the suppression record rather than deleting it, so the consent trail survives.

Read the guide →
4 min

What happens when your callback is down

Terminal outcomes are pushed to a URL you control, with a small bounded retry. Your handler has to tolerate a repeat, and it should not expect a call for every message.

Read the guide →
3 min

Which rate limit you just hit

There are two throttles in front of a send: the one your plan sets, and a much higher one at the network edge. Both answer with the same status code, so the message text is what tells them apart.

Read the guide →
3 min

Who the recipient actually sees

If you do not name a sender, the platform picks one from the connection that carries the message. Naming one explicitly takes priority everywhere.

Read the guide →
3 min

What the platform does not keep

Message content is not archived. What is kept is metadata — and among that metadata two fields are load-bearing, because without them a bill could not be reconciled.

Read the guide →
Scope. These guides walk the SMS channel through from first connection to production. Email and WhatsApp work on the same connection model — pick a provider, link your own account, send from the console.