Your company's name as the SMS sender

A custom sender ID shows your brand instead of a number. Here is how it gets approved by the mobile networks, step by step, from the request in the dashboard to the result for each network.

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Thursday, 9 April

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What you need before you start

Read the guide

A company account

The mobile networks approve custom senders for companies only. An individual account sends with the default sender.

The sender name

Up to 11 characters: letters, digits and hyphens, with no spaces or diacritics. A name belongs to a single account, so it must not be taken already.

A sample SMS

A real message, the way you will send it to your customers. The networks ask for it to judge what the sender is used for.

The company type

Whether the sender name is a registered trademark or not. The document templates differ between the two.

A signed document for each network

One for Orange, Vodafone, Telekom and Digi each: download the template from the request, fill it in, have it signed by a company representative and upload it (PDF, DOC, DOCX or ODT, up to 10 MB).

The approval fee

A one-off fee of €400 per request, excluding VAT, paid on a proforma, by card or bank transfer, not from the credit.

The approval, in four steps

Everything happens in the request, in the dashboard: the documents, the fee, the messages with our team and the results.

  1. 1

    Fill in the request

    In the dashboard, under Messages › Senders, start a new request with the name, the sample SMS, the company type and the four documents. The draft is saved any time, so you can come back to it.

  2. 2

    Submit it and pay the fee

    When nothing is missing, submit the request: a proforma is issued for the fee. The name is fixed from this moment. A proforma cancelled or left unpaid sends the request back to its draft.

  3. 3

    The networks review it

    Once the proforma is paid, the request goes to the mobile networks, which usually decide in 1–2 weeks. If they need more information, you get a message in the request and reply there, with attachments if needed.

  4. 4

    One result per network

    Each network approves or rejects the sender on its own, and you are told every result by email and in the dashboard. The sender can be used as soon as one network approved it.

What each status means

The request has its own status, and every network gives its own result.

The request

  • Draft — The request is being filled in. You can change anything, the name included.
  • Awaiting the fee — The request was submitted and the fee's proforma was issued. Processing starts once it is paid.
  • Processing — The fee was paid and the mobile networks are reviewing the request.
  • Information requested — The networks asked for more details. Update the documents if needed and reply in the request; it then goes back to processing.
  • Completed — Every network gave its result.

The result per network

  • Pending — The network has not decided yet.
  • Approved — Subscribers of that network see your sender name.
  • Rejected — The network refused the sender; its reason is shown in the request. Its subscribers still get your messages, from a short number of that network.

Until at least one network approves it, the sender cannot be used: a message that names it is refused with HTTP 422 ("The sender is invalid or is not approved.") and is not sent.

Answers to frequent questions

Usually 1–2 weeks from the moment the fee is paid. Each network decides on its own schedule, so the results may come on different days.
Yes, from the default sender: leave the sender field out of the API request. A message that names a sender which is not approved yet is refused with HTTP 422 and is not sent.
No. The mobile networks approve custom senders for companies only, so the request needs a company account.
No. The name is what the networks approve, so it is fixed once the fee is asked for. Until then, while the request is a draft, you can change it freely.
You can use it right away. Subscribers of the networks that approved it see your sender name; those of the networks that rejected it receive the message from a short number of their network.
Read the reason each network gave, shown in the request, and write to us there if anything is unclear. You can then start a new request, with another name or corrected documents; it goes through the same steps, the fee included.
Pick it as the sender when you send an SMS from the dashboard, or pass it in the sender field of the API, written exactly as it was approved: upper and lower case letters count.

Guides

The request screen by screen, and how to choose a name the networks approve and your customers trust.

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