SMS

Text messages through the gateway you already pay for. Addressed to a person, not a device — like email, and unlike push.

Notibase does not resell text messages. You connect your own Twilio, MSG91, Sinch or AakashSMS account — or any HTTP gateway at all — and the sender registration, the number and the per-message price stay yours. One text to one person is one send on your plan, exactly like one push to one device.

Connect a gateway

Console → your app → Settings → SMS.

Numbers are E.164 or nothing

Store +9779812345678, not 9812345678. A national number is ambiguous without a country, and the failure is not a bounce — it is a message delivered to a stranger in another country. A number that is not E.164 is refused at send time with address_invalid and shows in the delivery log as refused rather than vanishing.

The SMS page counts how many of your people have unusable numbers, so you can find out before a campaign rather than during one.

What we send each provider is not always what you stored, because they disagree:

Send one

An sms block on any send. On its own it is an SMS-only campaign; beside a title it is one message on two channels.

await nb.messages.send({
  audience: { segment_id: "..." },
  content: {
    sms: {
      text: "Your code is {{code}}. It expires in 10 minutes.",
      transactional: true
    }
  }
});

Attributes substitute the same way they do everywhere else, and an unknown one renders as nothing rather than as {{name}}.

What a message costs

One "SMS" is one to ten billable messages, and the trap is invisible. The basic SMS alphabet (GSM 03.38) fits 160 characters in one message. A single character outside it — an emoji, or the curly apostrophe a word processor puts in don’t — switches the whole message to a 16-bit encoding where the limit is 70. The same text becomes three messages and you are billed for three.

The composer counts as you type, names the exact character that forced UCS-2, and offers to swap decorative punctuation — curly quotes, en dashes, ellipses — for plain equivalents. It will never touch an accented letter: cafe is not café, and rewriting somebody's copy to save money is not ours to do. Anything over ten segments is refused, because at that point it is almost always a paste rather than a message.

The count and encoding are recorded on every delivery, so the number is answerable after the fact too. To be clear about who charges what: three segments is three messages on your provider’s bill and one send on your Notibase plan.

Opting out

Notibase does not append "reply STOP". The carrier and your gateway already handle STOP, HELP and the rest before we hear about it, and our own version would cost eleven characters of every message to do nothing new.

When your provider tells us a number has opted out, that comes back as address_gone and the number is suppressed for that app — the same way a hard bounce suppresses an email address. You can also opt somebody out yourself:

// server key
await fetch("https://api.notibase.com/v1/unsubscribe", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { authorization: `Bearer ${SERVER_KEY}`, "content-type": "application/json" },
  body: JSON.stringify({ phone: "+9779812345678", reason: "user_request" })
});
// or by your own user id, which covers their number AND their email at once
// { external_id: "u_123" }

Any other gateway

Pick Anything else and describe the request. {{to}}, {{text}} and {{sender}} are substituted and escaped, so a message containing a quote cannot break the body you wrote.

URL     https://gateway.example.com/send
Body    {"to":"{{to}}","message":"{{text}}","from":"{{sender}}"}
Headers Authorization: Bearer …
Success "status":"queued"

The URL must be HTTPS and must not resolve to a private address — a gateway on 169.254.169.254 or 10.0.0.5 is refused, because otherwise this feature is a way to make our servers fetch things inside our own network.

Getting numbers in

Delivery, and what "sent" means

sent means your gateway accepted the message. Whether a handset rang is between your provider and the carrier, and no platform can honestly tell you otherwise — so we do not pretend to. The raw response from your gateway is kept per message, which is usually the whole diagnosis.

Webhooks carry SMS like any other channel: "channel": "sms", a null device_id, and the recipient's address.

Limits and plan