Organizations are increasingly using cell phone text messages to verify log-in credentials, notify customers of their account status or even market their services. But until Tuesday, their ability to do so at scale using Amazon Web Services’ Simple Notification Service (SNS) was limited to U.S.-registered phone numbers.
Now companies wanting to send text messages to current or prospective customers can use SNS to do so in 200 countries, AWS said in an announcement. And they can do so from six of AWS’s 13 regions, up from only one: the Eastern U.S. region. The new regions are U.S. East (Northern Virginia), Asia Pacific (Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo) and EU (Ireland).
The technology no longer requires customers to opt in to get messages, though local laws may require them to have done so. SNS lets applications send time-critical messages to multiple subscribers through a “push” mechanism, eliminating the need to periodically poll for updates.
There is no minimum fee. SNS users pay 50 cents per 1 million SNS requests, though new users can get started for free, according to the SNS FAQs.
