Frequently asked questions

An Android phone (8.0+) with a SIM, and five minutes to pair it.

Sign up, pair a phone, send — typically under five minutes.

You send from a real SIM and a real local number. Carriers treat it as person-to-person and don't filter it like shared short codes.

Because you're sending from a real SIM that carriers treat as person-to-person, messages usually arrive within seconds. Exact speed and delivery rates depend on your carrier, device, and signal — so we describe typical behaviour rather than promise a fixed number.

$5 per phone per month, unlimited messages. Free tier covers 1 phone.

No.

No — it's your own SIM, so no carrier registration or vetting.

SMSKit is built for your own controlled volume (OTP, alerts, two-way). Consumer SIMs are rate-limited by carriers, so it is not a route for unsolicited mass marketing. Always follow local consent and opt-out laws — replies (including STOP requests) reach you via two-way messaging and webhooks, and honoring them is your responsibility.

Any Android 8.0+. Cheap and used phones are fine. Dual-SIM supported.

As many as you have phone slots ($5 each). The engine load-balances across them.

A per-device hourly limit (default 200/hr) keeps carriers happy.

Download the signed APK from the Download page and open it — we walk you through the few Android prompts. It installs in under a minute.

Yes — the APK is signed and, when a checksum is published, you can verify its SHA-256. See the Download page.

So Android does not sleep the app and miss sends.

Jobs auto-failover to a healthy phone.

They retry across devices; exhausted jobs land in a dead-letter queue you can inspect.

On our managed platform, in a database dedicated to your account — never pooled with other customers'. We host and operate it; you don't run any servers.

Yes — two-way messaging, threading, and sms:received webhooks.

No — SMSKit sends and receives SMS over your own SIM. WhatsApp, MMS, and voice are not supported.

An opt-in import of the inbox and sent history already on your phone — including business texts sent from the phone's own app — into your SMSKit account. It merges with your live and SMSKit-sent messages into one searchable two-way timeline.

Bulk-export the whole timeline to NDJSON or CSV (GET /api/archive/export), or pull it programmatically with GET /api/messages — paginated and filterable by contact, direction, origin, and date.

Archived data follows your plan's retention window, lives in your account's isolated database, and is deletable per-record or in bulk from the dashboard and API at any time.