zlacker

Maybe they should flip it on its head - get a thousand? Ten thousand? numbers that can accept SMS and tell people to "text 473843 to this number" to verify.

>>bombca+(OP)
That's in fact how iMessage does phone number verification. It works really poorly internationally.

>>bombca+(OP)
It's usually even more expensive to support receiving messages than sending them, beyond keywords like Unsubscribe. If you want any sort of threading its going to be extra. Also its extra for dedicated shortcodes. When you get an SMS from a random shortcode, there might be multiple companies using that code, but they mix the pools enough that its unlikely you will receive two messages from two companies from the same code. Also shortcodes are usually country/region locked. So if you want to international support, you need to buy shortcodes in multiple regions, and different regions have different telco laws. On top of that, provisioning is very manual compared to the modern cloud.

I supported a marketing platform for a while, and it was so much easier to send an email than an sms.

>>bombca+(OP)
SMS sender isn't generally something you can trust. If you get the SMS directly from the carrier that's responsible for the number, and you have reason to trust their SMS sending to verify the sender, then yes. But in countries with number portability, you still need to pay to lookup the carrier responsible for a number.

And you'll need to maintain ingress numbers in all the countries you support, and maybe numbers per carrier, depending, and you'll need to tell the user the right number to text to ... it's a lot, and it might not work well or might not save much money.