Send up to 50,000 SMS Messages a Day with Toll-free SMS

Over the past few months, here at RingCentral we’ve been hard at work quietly rolling out the beta of Toll-free SMS messaging, a pay per message service that allows you to send commercial or automated messages to your customers. We’re excited to share that this feature is now live and generally available to all RingCentral Office® Premium and Ultimate customers.

Why Toll-free SMS?

Traditional SMS, referred to as Person to Person (or P2P) SMS has several limitations that have been set by carriers. These limitations include:

• Only being able to send messages to 200 numbers per day
• Only being able to send up to 1,000 messages per day
• Messages must act like human conversations, expecting a 1:1 send/ receive ratio
• No more than one message per second may be sent

If a P2P message or number does not meet these requirements, it may be blocked by the carriers. This means that not only would your automated messages not go through — but potentially your human texts would be blocked as well.

With Toll-free SMS, these limitations no longer apply. This means you can send to more than 200 unique numbers, and more than 1,000 messages per day. You also don’t have to worry about users responding — allowing you to use SMS for a number of use cases such as Two-factor authorization, sharing promotional codes, sending shipping updates, appointment reminders, or just sharing company news!

Available Today

Today, RingCentral Office® Premium and Ultimate users may take advantage of Toll-free SMS by contacting RingCentral support and having their existing Toll-free (or a newly purchased Toll-free number) SMS enabled.

Note: Toll-free SMS messages are billed $0.007 for every message sent/ received. Concatenated messages may be billed as multiple messages. As such, you may need to adjust your daily spending limits to prevent message failures. When talking to support, ask about your billing limits to ensure that you have a large enough limit to send the quantity of messages desired.

Once you have a SMS enabled Toll-free number, you may utilize our SMS API to send Toll-free SMS messages. Today there is a limit of 40 messages per minute for SMS (regular or Toll-free).

$resp = $platform->post('/account/~/extension/~/sms',
    array(
       'from' => array ('phoneNumber' => $RINGCENTRAL_USERNAME),
       'to' => array(array('phoneNumber' => $RECIPIENT)),
       'text' => 'Hello World from PHP'
    )
);

Billing

Toll-free SMS messages will automatically be deducted from your account credit/ charged to your credit card, similarly to toll-free minute overages or international calls/ SMS messages.

You may see a complete breakdown of charges as well as messages sent in the Admin Portal using the Toll-free SMS log.

Note: if you do not setup your daily/ maximum spend limits to meet your sending needs, once that maximum is met you will no longer be able to send Toll-free SMS messages until you adjust these limits.

Learn More

To learn more about Toll-free SMS contact developer support, visit our developer forum, or take a look at our getting started guides.

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