We are just about to give up on Clickatell (Clickatell.com) after a horrible experience. I would strongly suggest to stay away from Clickatell especially for two way SMS.
We had a requirement to send bulk SMS around (mostly US). As we wanted to send SMSs on per transaction to every user and to let them opt-out and get help. Clickatell convinced one of our directors that having our own short-code was the only way to do this as we signed up with Clickatell back in Octorber. It took about 20 days for them to setup our account properly so we can do all testing and complete API development on our side to use their APIs. Our development was done in early December hoping to get the service going before Christmas. It was a painful experience to get our short code approved through them with carriers. Took a few 100 emails and some dozen phone calls before we finally got it done just after first week of April. For all the complicated rules they apply for the shortcode, you are allowed to 60 characters of your own and rest 100 characters go in the name of regulations (some of them only Clickatell is willing to enforce). They charged 1000s of dollars (more than 10k) for this shortcode approval process; promised to get it working before Christmas (20 days) and it took them about 5 months. And guess what? They are charging us for the short code rental since December. Refund? No way.. they think it is absolutely right as they got the shortcode reserved for us since then though they could not make it work. We send about 10-15k messages per day and about 70-80% of these messages fail every day. You guessed it... they charge us for all of those undelivered/failed messages and again they think that it is absolutely alright to charge us for every message once handed over to their system even though their system was not able to deliver it. Make sure to have a look at their supported carriers list (link can be found somewhere in the fine print) as they can deliver messages to only those. Carriers like MetroPCS (a major carrier in US east coast) are not supported. So if you send a message to numbers belonging to MetroPCS it won't be delivered but of course we are being charged for it. Many carriers in US do not offer free incoming messages or at least most of their plans do not include it so a big number of people have their carrier to block incoming messages to avoid charges. If you send messages to those your message will not be delivered but you will be charged for these messages. They don't have a method of properly notifying that why a message was not delivered. Their API will just notify that a message was not delivered. You can give individual numbers to their support to investigate and they will normally come back to you within 5 business days (normally 5th) to tell you that message was not delivered as mobile subscriber has disabled incoming messages (or similar reason). There is no automated way... imagine manually investigating 10,000 numbers per day. Don't forget that you will still be charged for all these messages. There is no way to find out the carrier for a particular number before you try to send a message. Well not even after you have sent the message and paid for the failure still there is no automated way of known the carrier so you can mark the number for future. You login to their interface and see the log to findout the carrier. You are charged for every delivered/undelivered message you try to send. Thankfully they don't charge you for messages to landline. So we pay for about 10,000 messages every day even though about 2,000 of them are delivered and rest 70-80% are not delivered to all kind of reasons. The time I took to write this long email is nothing compare to the time we wasted with clickatell We just signed up for a trial account with Trumpia (trumpia.com) and probably some others. Will let you know about our experience as we go ahead. Regards, Ehsan Malik -----Original Message----- From: Claudius - Asterisk DL [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: April-14-11 8:47 PM To: Bruce N; asterisk Mailing Subject: RE: [on-asterisk] Bulk SMS provider? Clickatell.com I've have been using them for 5+ years now ... at times even cheaper than my CDN cell provider. And yes, they allow SenderID be set -----Original Message----- From: Bruce N [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: April-14-11 7:43 PM To: asterisk Mailing Subject: [on-asterisk] Bulk SMS provider? Hi Everyone, Does anyone have any recommendations for an international SMS provider which allows Sender ID setting? Regards, Bruce --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
