Amazon SNS now supports SMS Sandbox and displays available origination IDs in your account

Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is a fully-managed messaging service that supports application-to-person (A2P) workloads, including mobile text messaging (SMS). Now, when you start using Amazon SNS to send SMS, your SMS workloads start in an isolated testing environment, called the SMS sandbox.

To increase consumer trust in SMS, the A2P industry, across various countries, has set new policies and requirements for commercial entities to be able to send SMS to consumers. In India, the Telecom Authority of India (TRAI) introduced regulations requiring each commercial entity to register their sender ID as well as their SMS message templates. In the US, telecom carriers started requiring that each commercial entity register their SMS origination ID to send A2P SMS messages to US phone numbers. Thus, Amazon SNS announced support for TRAI requirements for sending SMS to India, as well as support for ten-digit long codes (10DLC) and toll-free numbers (TFN) for sending SMS to the US.

Now, we are introducing the SMS sandbox. It provides an environment for you to safely develop and test your SMS workloads in Amazon SNS. While in the SMS sandbox, you can add up to 10 destination phone numbers, and verify them via one-time passwords (OTP), using either the Amazon SNS console or SDK. You can then use Amazon SNS to send SMS to these verified destination numbers. In the SMS sandbox, before your solution is enabled for production use, you can perform development and testing activities for your SMS workloads, confirm if you need to take steps to comply with country-specific requirements, purchase and register the required SMS resources (such as an SMS origination identity), and set the SMS spend quota needed for your application. When you are ready, you can apply to move your account to production, enabling your application to send SMS to unverified destination phone numbers.

You can check if you are in the SMS sandbox by checking the status of your account via the Amazon SNS console or SDK. If you are currently using Amazon SNS to send SMS messages, your account has automatically been upgraded to production status, in AWS regions where you currently operate.

In addition to the SMS sandbox, the Amazon SNS console now displays the list of origination phone numbers associated with your account. When operating in multiple countries, you can now use this list to view the origination ID that you can use to send SMS via Amazon SNS to a specific country. If you have Amazon CloudWatch logs enabled, SMS delivery logs are now displayed in your Amazon SNS console, further improving your ability to troubleshoot SMS delivery failures during development.

Along with these updates to Amazon SNS, we are announcing updated SMS pricing in the US and Canada. The new pricing now separates the provided SMS price into two components, namely the AWS base price and a carrier fee. This fee structure provides you more visibility into the components of per-unit price of SMS, which depends on the type of origination ID that you use to send SMS, the route the SMS takes, and other carrier network factors.

The following resources can help you get started:

• For more information on the SMS Sandbox and for production access, see SMS Sandbox in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide, and the Introducing the SMS sandbox for Amazon SNS blog post.
• For more information on SMS origination numbers, see Origination Numbers in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide, and the Provisioning and using 10DLC origination numbers with Amazon SNS blog post.
• For more information on SMS delvery status logging, see Viewing Amazon CloudWatch metrics and logs for SMS deliveries in the Amazon SNS Developer Guide.
• To test your SMS messages with the new message attributes, you may use the Publish SMS message form, in the Amazon SNS Management Console.
• To learn more about SMS pricing, see US and Canada prices in the Amazon SNS pricing page.