AWS SNS — Send SMS in Sri Lanka

With the recent announcement of its worldwide support to send SMS, now we can deliver both transactional and promotional text messages to carriers in Sri Lanka — a much awaited feature in SNS. (earlier it was a US-based phone numbers only feature in SNS)

Along with this expansion, SNS has also enabled the default “Opt-in” for recipients. Now the developers can deliver messages right away to recipient phone number without a prior opt-in. This will help in several occasions such as when sending OTP, MFA codes or any other direct publishing requirements in your application. As recipients, you can “Opt-out” your self by sending a SMS with “STOP” text.

AWS no longer use 30304 as the short code for SMS, instead it has a pool of short codes/long codes. However the SMS send from an AWS account will use the same code — mine was set to “NXSMS”. Ideally you can set your own Sticky sender ID, but unfortunately this doesn’t support in Sri Lanka yet.

Something really doesn’t work well is the pricing introduced for Sri Lankan carriers — Who to blame local carriers or AWS ? For Promotional text messages there is a lower rate, but still it’s way too expensive for a SMS.

But despite the cost, SNS/SMS comes with some rich set of features which doesn’t available right now from any local SMS API provider.

To send SMS you can either use AWS console or AWS API with delivery status, logging, usage reports, opt-out management etc — more on this here.