Scale your customer engagement with a reliable and proven SMS API

SMS APIs allow businesses to automate the sending and receiving of text messages. This can save a lot of time and effort, especially for businesses that send a high volume of SMS messages, such as for marketing campaigns or customer notifications. Moreover, SMS APIs can be integrated with other business systems and are highly scalable allowing businesses to easily send and receive a large number of SMS messages without any problems. Plus, they are also cost-effective compared to other channels.

DLT registration ensures compliance with regulatory requirements for sending commercial messages via SMS, and the process involves registering message templates with the respective telecom authorities.

To send SMS using an API, integrate a suitable SMS API provider like Gupshup, into your application and follow their documentation for sending messages programmatically.

Requirements for an SMS API typically include an API key, authentication credentials, and adherence to the provider's usage policies and guidelines.

An SMS API (Application Programming Interface) provides an integration platform to programmatically send and receive SMS messages.
SMS API provides an easy-to-use interface to integrate messaging into your marketing and customer service programs. You can reliably send SMS to your audience, for use cases such as alerts and notifications, feedback and surveys, payment reminders, and verification codes/ OTPs.

An SMS API makes it easy to connect to an SMS gateway and send messages at scale in a reliable and secure way. Some of the uses and benefits include:

• Send and receive messages such as alerts, notifications, transactional messages, and more
• Connect with customers in different countries without worrying about technical details like carrier, deliverability, pricing differences, etc.
• Review message delivery and status in real-time
• Queue messages for delivery

An SMS API is a basic building block that makes it possible for brands to connect to an SMS gateway easily and eliminates the need to use manual SMS systems.

The integration of SMS API is managed by a software developer. It requires programming, server configuration, data modelling, testing, etc. to communicate with the API, and connect it with the SMS gateway.

It’s easy to build a test integration in just a few hours. For example, to integrate Gupshup’s SMS API from PHP, all you have to do is sign up with Gupshup, create a sender ID, create an API key, and install our PHP code library into your application. Once the PHP API is integrated into your software, you can start sending automated SMS messages from your application.

As per the recent guidelines by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) , it is mandatory for a business to register on the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform, a block-chain based registration system before sending bulk SMS to its customers. This is aimed at creating more transparency and reducing the incidence of spam and fraud done through SMS. A business entity has to register itself on the DLT portal, register Sender IDs and submit message templates.

Sending SMS messages via a mobile carrier may involve a charge. Some carriers also charge for receiving SMS messages. These costs can add up, depending on factors like the text volume, message type, countries sent to (or received from), price per message, etc.
With an SMS API provider you can send SMSes to customers in dozens of countries at a much lower rate than you would with regular carrier-based SMS. Gupshup offers pay-as-you-go pricing so you only pay for what you use with full transparency and full flexibility. You can send local and international messages, SMS to toll-free numbers, and more. All messages are sent programmatically, and the API is easy to set up, enabling rapid go live.