Cheapest SMS API Providers

SMS API: An Introduction

An SMS API is a powerful software integration interface designed to facilitate the seamless sending and receiving of short messages via an SMS API platform. By incorporating an SMS API into your applications or systems, you can create customized SMS channels that enable efficient and targeted communication, including text, images, and multimedia content. This versatile tool is widely employed across various industries for purposes such as marketing campaigns, customer support, appointment reminders, and notifications, offering a highly effective means of communication that can be tailored to meet specific business needs.

What Is An SMS API?

When one researches the features and services provided by SMS marketing providers, the SMS marketing API, and its efficiency is always discussed. But what is an API? An API is an acronym for Application Programming Interface, which is an IT software allowing a programmer to formulate a computer program that will make it easier to send text messages to recipients in a quick and effective manner. An SMS API might use rest API Systems use java, python, json, PHP, as well as many other programming languages and can be for a web-based system, operating system, or database system. Basically, it is a system that makes it easier for the programmer to gather and send information systematically. For example, the client may send an email with the text message required to be sent and the API file will give the developer the ability to copy files from one area to another without the developer having to understand the total file system operations.

Different SMS Marketing providers emphasize that an API is more than an exchange of text and image message service (SMS MMS SMPP) but a powerful software platform to simplify the text messaging service and ensure full and reliable delivery of bulk SMS messages.

How Does SMS API Work?

To start the process, the client needs to upload a file that has all the names of people that wish to be contacted. This may include email addresses or mobile phone numbers. A business must ensure that these audiences want to be conducted through the ability to opt-in, whether this is through sending shortcodes or sign-up forms, or OTP codes with a custom sender ID.

After this, the SMS gateway API will go through the following process:

1. The details are exported from an email program to the SMS campaigns on SMS marketing API platforms. It can be established as an online calendar containing appointments or reminders. The data format is processed using platforms such as Google, Outlook.com, Yahoo, or iCloud. Two-factor authentication is often required.
2. The marketing text message can be edited at any time and an SMS service provider or business can work out when the message needs to be sent, whether it is straight away or in a few days’ time.
3. As an SMS text marketing client, one can monitor the marketing effectiveness by the take-up rate. Whether a large or small business, such valuable information is extremely cost-effective and the SMS API software has the ability to send delivery reports for analysis.
4. The process can be completely automated or a business can opt to manually verify each text message before it is sent to add another form of personalization.

SMS API Software Features

There is a lot that goes into sending a simple text message to a target consumer from a business’s chosen system. Luckily for American businesses, SMS marketing API software makes the process easy, and doesn’t require extensive information. Reliable, customizable, and scalable to your needs, an SMS API service is a way for developers to connect to a Bulk SMS gateway. This means the client can SMS-enable a website or a system process (such as an email to SMS database) to send and receive text messages in various ways.

The features of an SMS marketing API integration include:

• Sending and receiving text messages through a reliable telecommunication carrier
• Sending transactional SMS or SMS Confirmation or OTP messages.
• Knowing which message has been sent to a given point of contact
• Having the ability to receive incoming SMS from customers on android, iOS, and even WhatsApp.
• Tracking messages with the time of day the message was distributed and received on the mobile phone
• In the case of receiving information that a message has not been delivered, the ability to take appropriate action by continuing to deliver the SMS by a certain time
• Knowing it is the real-time delivery of inbound SMS which is great for companies that need responses from customers or staff.

What Should You Look For In An Cheap SMS API?

Firstly, a business must ensure that the SMS gateway provider follows the laws, regulations, and best practices around any SMS marketing activity. The SMS marketing provider must be anti-SPAM compliant and should have its own privacy policy in place for the security and confidentially of all parties involved. As the mobile marketing industry is highly personal, it is a heavily regulated communication channel, thus businesses can’t just automate, but must ensure they are following the rules to reduce the likelihood of running into trouble. For example, a company must gain permission from its audiences (in other words, enable them to opt-in), whether this is through a form, or texting a short code to a dedicated number. Some SMS API providers also have specific prices related to toll-free numbers, which needs to be checked across each provider.

From a marketing perspective, please do not use words like ‘free’ unless you have a free-to-end user condition. All promotions and communication should include name, description, conditions, and the ability to opt-out if required.

Thirdly, SMS marketing providers should have shortcodes, which are five-digit numbers used for SMS messaging, and one should not be made to purchase but rather use the provider’s codes. Such services can be established for automatic replies to incoming SMS, therefore you should not be charged for inbound messages.

Overall, the reliability of the SMS marketing API provider is of the utmost importance. The reliability of an SMS company can be measured by its statement of an uptime guarantee, which should be at least 98%. This will mean that the provider’s success rate is almost at 100%. The core SMS providers have been outlined and rated below based on reliability.

So What’s The Cheapest SMS API?

When considering all the factors of an SMS marketing API provider, including software facilities, reliability, features, customer relations, compliance, costs, and more, it was found that overall, Clicksend offered the best outbound SMS services within the American industry. Not only does Clicksend offer highly valuable rates for small, medium, and large businesses, but they also offer a range of services, backed up by a highly reliable system and great customer service. The provider offers a free SMS trial to enable businesses to try out their text message API and various features.

Clicksend offers features such as mass SMS API calls to send SMS, MMS, SMS scheduling, lookup, notifications, and more. To learn more about their features, services, and costs, visit their website below or view our extensive Clicksend SMS review.

Clicksend Review >>Visit Clicksend >>

Why TrueDialog Has The Best Prices

It mainly comes down to volume pricing, TrueDialog offers some of the lowest SMS API prices in the USA:

TrueDialog Long Code Pricing

TrueDialog Short Code Pricing

• $0.0700/message or $7.00 per 1k messages (first 500k messages)
• $0.0500/message or $5.00 per 1k messages (next 4.5 million)
• $0.00400/message or $3.00 per 1k messages (next 20 million)
• $0.00200/message or $2.00 per 1k messages (next 75 million)

TrueDialog Reliability

TrueDialog’s SLA is one of the best in the market at 99.99% up-time guaranteed.

Businesses of all sizes use TrueDialog and love their 99.99% up-time guarantee.

Clicksend Features

As the cheapest SMS API provider, Clicksend could by every right charge a premium for extra features, yet they have chosen to include them at affordable rates to be used by businesses of various sizes and for different use cases:

• Ability to send short message appointment reminders automatically as well as alerts at scale.
• Able to Schedule SMS with their custom scheduling engine to deploy reseller campaigns at custom time intervals
• Capacity to communicate two ways with customers via two-way SMS delivery

Examples of CRM systems that Clicksend integrates with:

• Microsoft Dynamics
• Social Messaging Apps
• Salesforce
• Hubspot

And more.

Clicksend offers many unique features for text service at the cheapest SMS API prices in the USA, while also offering a 15-day free SMS API trial.

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