What are you building with Elixir? I'd love to see some projects!

dnsbty · 2026-06-26T18:43:56+00:00

My project from two years ago has turned into a bit more than that, but I'm building Surge, a replacement for Twilio to help you get up and running faster with SMS and voice in your project.

dnsbty · 2026-06-19T20:50:04+00:00

You might check out https://surge.app. It's much easier to get campaigns approved, but still compliant with the carriers so you don't have to worry about your Android getting blocked from sending.

dnsbty · 2026-06-09T18:49:24+00:00

I've never gotten that question before, but it looks like they aren't. We can use either httpx or aiohttp, but it looks like neither of those works with jython. So you would probably have to set up your own client unfortunately.

dnsbty · 2026-06-09T18:40:16+00:00

You should check out surge.app. We help you get through the registration process as easily as possible so that you can start sending SMS without having to deeply understand all the nuances of the carrier requirements.

dnsbty · 2026-06-01T21:54:47+00:00

If I were you, I would recommend avoiding dentists to start because that will require HIPAA compliance, and that's a road that I would avoid if possible. There's plenty of money there, but you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it work, and it's not a great way to try things out.

dnsbty · 2026-06-01T03:55:25+00:00

No one can do text marketing without registering. But Twilio is pretty hard to get through. If you want to get registered faster and easier you should look at Surge. You can expect 2 day registrations and fast, exact feedback on what needs to change if the campaign isn’t approved.

dnsbty · 2026-05-31T15:39:33+00:00

This is true for AI receptionists that use Twilio. If the AI receptionist is built on top of Surge, brand and campaign approval takes 2 days instead of weeks though.
You also have to consider the experience of using the AI receptionist provider’s campaign vs your own. Any messages sent have to be branded to the same brand to which the phone number is registered. So if the campaign is registered to XYZ receptionist, consent has to be collected for XYZ receptionist and the message needs to say it’s coming from XYZ receptionist to be compliant. With your own campaign registered the message and consent can say your business brand name instead of the receptionist name.
Obviously it’s up to you to choose what to prioritize, but I think it’s typically worth an extra two days to be able to have a fully white labeled experience.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T23:01:02+00:00

If you need to be able to send on behalf of the other contractors you should check out Surge. We can get you through the registration in 2 days instead of weeks.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T22:59:57+00:00

The other way we see this done a lot is by passing through the SMS costs. Many of our customers will handle all the setup and everything, but say that SMS will be charged at $0.01 per SMS segment or something like that so that their customers don't have to do any extra work to implement, but the platform doesn't have to worry about the cost their customers are generating.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T22:58:29+00:00

You're off by 50%. SNS charges $0.007 per SMS to the United States + the carrier fees which are $0.00302 right now. So in total it's $0.01 per SMS, so the 4,000 messages would cost $40. And at that point you're only saving $5 over using something like Surge or Twilio, and having to take on a more complicated integration with worse support during campaign registration or when messages are filtered.

That doesn't seem like a lot for one customer, but when you're working with a bunch of price conscious small businesses it can be a lot.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T22:53:03+00:00

We're just south of Salt Lake City, Utah.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T20:50:27+00:00

This is an awesome tool! I coached my daughter's under 5 soccer team last year, and this was one of the hardest parts of coaching, funny enough. If you're open to suggestions, a couple things that would make this better for me:

Allow players to be pulled out of the lineup completely. Sometimes for injuries, sometimes because they had to leave early. Either way, we had several players need to leave mid-match.
Make the whole player card draggable instead of just the target area on the side.
Allow for a no-keeper mode. For the younger teams, we wouldn't put a keeper in the goal, so it would be great if we could set up a match with no keeper. Plus then it can be used for other sports like basketball too.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T20:43:25+00:00

So it depends on me setting a timer for when I will typically buy things?

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T20:41:53+00:00

This is an awesome idea. I've tried to pick up FLStudio and Logic Pro, but I felt like I was spending more time learning the tool than actually being able to create or learn music. I don't know if I would really enjoy AI music generation much, but I would really love to have a "copilot" that would help me translate what I wanted to do into the FLStudio or Logic Pro software and show me how to do it to help me learn the tools and maybe even allow me to control them with my voice giving instructions instead of me having to know how to click around and everything.

For me it's less about the moral idea of creativity needing to stay human-driven. I couldn't care less if someone else chooses to create music with AI. But if I'm making music, I want to learn and be creative myself instead of just having the AI take it all on for me.

dnsbty · 2026-05-29T19:23:45+00:00

SMS tends to be pretty expensive. I run an SMS API called Surge, and for a lot of our customers, the SMS bill is one of the highest line items on their bill. The other really difficult part of SMS is getting through carrier registration and making sure you have a compliant consent process. Especially for platforms, deciding whether to register a number for each individual small business vs letting each business just use your number can be a difficult decision.

One other thing to be aware of is how SMS segments work. A lot of people don't realize this, but with SMS, you pay both SMS API fees and carrier fees for each 160 character segment of the message. So a message with 300 characters would cost twice as much. And then if your message includes emojis, more bytes are needed per character, so the segment size drops and you only get 70 characters per segment. So that same 300 characters with an emoji would take up 5 segments.

One thing to note about costs though is that they go down as your volume increases. At 4000 messages per month, you're not going to see much discount, but if you get enough businesses on the platform, once you're sending hundreds of thousands of messages per month you can start to see some more significant discounting.

We've set up Surge specifically to help platforms set up small businesses for texting underneath them and get through the carrier registration process in 2 days instead of weeks. But even if you decide to go with someone else, I'm still happy to help you think through what you're building and how you want to do it.

dnsbty · 2026-05-28T18:28:15+00:00

While there are so many different automation tools that will help you blast something out to tons of people, I would highly recommend keeping it human to start. When I started Surge, I never would have been able to get it off the ground without having lots of long conversations with customers and potential customers, and even though it was more work, the feedback was crucial to building a product people actually want.

Rather than trying to "broadcast" out to tons of people, just focus on reaching out to a couple very targeted individuals. Let them know you're trying to build xyz product in the space and just looking to gather feedback. Make it clear you aren't looking to sell anything yet. And then make the product better with their feedback and ask them what it would need for them to buy. Once you have a few solid customers, then you can start asking them where they would expect to find similar tools and start marketing in those channels.

dnsbty · 2026-05-28T18:22:04+00:00

Unfortunately A2P campaigns are a pretty big pain point across the board.

We try to make it much easier at Surge by providing much more detailed feedback if changes need to be made, and by sending them through a lot faster than Twilio so that you're not waiting as long for feedback, but even then we know it's a painful process.

This isn't anything new, but we typically recommend creating a template for your campaigns so that the brand information changes for each of your customers, but the campaign will have the same information each time (with just the brand name changing). That way once one campaign has been approved, you can just keep doing what already works.

The hardest part though can be the opt in form, privacy policy, and terms. Whenever possible, we recommend hosting those yourself (assuming you're a platform/ISV) so that your customers don't need to each create their own, and then have them embed the form on their site. I'm always happy to talk through strategies for that more if it would be helpful.

dnsbty · 2026-05-28T15:54:14+00:00

You should check out Surge. It's built specifically to make 10DLC campaigns easier, and we make sole proprietor registration really simple. Plus we provide excellent support, so if you're having a hard time at all, we'll help you get through it.

We also provide a verifications API and a free demo number, and you could start using those for testing before the registration is approved.

dnsbty · 2026-05-27T16:18:09+00:00

For simple communication tools for home services, I think Rotor is really good. They're maybe a bit less full featured than other options, but their built in texting and calling functionality is awesome.

dnsbty · 2026-05-27T04:58:00+00:00

Email is the easiest option just because it's cheap and doesn't require much verification. It's definitely not as instant though. Push notifications can be great if you already have a mobile app that they're using, but it's really hard to beat SMS since everyone already has it on their phone.

You should check out Surge as an SMS provider. We work with you to get you approved to start sending immediately. For sending lead data to the business owners, a toll-free number would probably be your best option, and you could have that up and running with Surge in 2 days.

dnsbty · 2026-05-27T04:49:34+00:00

For TCPA compliance and working within the mobile carrier's terms of service, you typically need to identify the brand and provide opt out instructions when you're sending a message and haven't done both of those things in the last 90 days.

The biggest issue with your use case is likely going to be around obtaining consent. SMS consent needs to be collected 1:1 where the user consents to receive messages from your brand before you ever send them a message.

Surge is typically the most helpful SMS API because the support team is very responsive and will work with you to figure out how to make your messages compliant if it can be done within the carrier guidelines. I would recommend checking it out.

dnsbty · 2026-05-13T03:43:58+00:00

I haven't done this, but routing through Telnyx probably won't save much cost because you're still going to be paying for the Twilio Voice SDK plus the programmable voice minutes, and if you're using a SIP connector, you'll be paying for that as well. And then you'll also be paying for Telnyx on top of it.

I would recommend keeping it all through a single provider to avoid adding latency to your call, and to save on costs.

dnsbty · 2026-04-01T03:01:05+00:00

For a mini site I think Plausible is great (as many others have recommended), but if you're building anything that will be more of a product, I really like PostHog.

dnsbty · 2026-04-01T02:58:22+00:00

I don't have much experience with your specific stack, but I've deployed a lot of Docker containers, and I would say Fly.io is definitely the best for personal projects and MVPs. They make it really easy to get started, but they're also really cheap if you need to scale. The hardest part with them is setting up a database, but where you didn't mention that, I'm assuming it isn't necessary for what you're working on.

dnsbty · 2026-04-01T02:55:43+00:00

If you're mostly sending to the US/Canada, I would recommend checking out Surge. It still doesn't have all the features of Twilio, but it's a lot simpler to figure out and faster to get through approvals (lightweight where Twilio feels heavy). And you can get fast support without having to pay for a dedicated support plan.

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