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 →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.
Acceptance is not delivery
When a provider accepts a message, all it has confirmed is that the request was well-formed and the provider has taken responsibility for it. The handset has not been reached. Delivery happens later, asynchronously, and arrives as a separate event.
These are different facts and they belong in different columns. A dashboard that shows accepted messages as delivered is not being optimistic; it is reporting something that has not happened yet.
Receipts arrive in stages
A message commonly passes through a queued state, a sent or submitted state, and finally a delivered or failed state. Some providers also emit states that are only meaningful while a message is being retried.
The intermediate states are informational. Only the terminal outcome should be used to decide whether a message arrived, and a system that promotes an intermediate state to a terminal one will produce numbers that are wrong in the direction of looking better than reality.
Normalised, with the original kept
Each provider reports statuses in its own vocabulary. The platform maps them into one shared set so that the same outcome reads the same way regardless of which provider handled the message, and keeps the raw provider code alongside so nothing is lost in the translation.
The practical effect is that a failure reason is comparable across providers, while a provider-specific error still has a code you can hand to that provider support team verbatim.
Forwards, not just views
Receipts are not only a dashboard concern. The platform can forward them to an endpoint you control, so delivery outcomes can drive your own systems — a retry, a support ticket, a customer notification.
Scope. Delivery receipt collection and forwarding are implemented for the SMS channel. Email and WhatsApp receipts are not implemented for those channels today.
Keep reading
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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →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 →