Sending SMS to any country

TextRail takes a mobile number in any country, at one price: 2 cents a text. Whether a text arrives is up to the local carriers, so here is what that means before you rely on it.

Any number, one price

Send to any number written in E.164 format, like +14165550123. There are no country rates to look up and no country list to check: every text costs 2 cents, wherever it goes.

Local carriers decide what arrives

Once a text is sent, the recipient’s carrier decides what happens next. Carriers can delay, filter or refuse texts, and the rules differ from country to country.

• Some countries filter texts that come from abroad.
• Some ask senders to register first, for example a sender name, and drop texts that don’t follow their rules.
• A carrier can change its rules at any time, without telling us or you.

So we don’t publish a list of supported countries. We can’t promise that a text will arrive in any of them.

What the status tells you

Sent means the text was handed to the carrier. Delivered means the carrier reported delivery. Receipts depend on the carrier and network, and some never send one, so a text can stay at Sent and still arrive. A receipt doesn’t show that the person saw the text. The message statuses list every one.

When you pay

You’re charged 2 cents when a text is sent to the carrier. That holds whether or not a receipt comes back, and whatever the local carrier does with it afterwards. A text that fails or expires before it’s sent costs nothing. If we ever stop taking numbers in a country, the API answers COUNTRY_NOT_ALLOWED before anything is held.

Try your countries first

Test keys are free and check everything except the real text. Before you go live in a country, top up from $10 and send a few real texts to numbers you can check, so you know how they arrive there. The pricing page has the rest of the costs.