touchSMS Review

Provider Overview

touchSMS is the self-serve SMS platform of Edgility, a Sydney-based mobile messaging company that has been in the Australian market since the early days of intercarrier SMS. Edgility also runs MessagePort, its enterprise messaging product, so touchSMS is the sub-brand rather than the whole company. Knowing that matters because it explains what you get at the price: the carrier connections, compliance work and infrastructure were built for enterprise customers, and touchSMS puts a pay-as-you-go front end on them.

A few things stand out against the other providers we have reviewed:

• Australian owned and operated. With MessageMedia and ClickSend both now owned by Sinch, touchSMS is one of the few established local providers that has not been acquired by a global parent. Data is stored onshore.
• ACMA-certified telco provider. touchSMS is a carriage service provider in its own right and is listed on the ACMA SMS Sender ID Register, so alphanumeric sender IDs are registered directly rather than through a reseller.
• Direct local routes for Australia and New Zealand rather than resold international routes, which is what you want for delivery speed and consistency on domestic traffic.

The platform covers the usual ground: two-way SMS and MMS, bulk sends with merge fields, CSV merge, templates, scheduled and recurring messages, contact groups, real-time delivery reporting and automatic opt-out handling. There is an SMS chat inbox for conversational use, a URL-based opt-out form for when you send from a branded sender ID, SSO for larger teams, and a two-factor authentication product on top of the core API.

Support runs through a knowledge base, a ticket system and a Sydney phone number. We could not find published support hours, so if 24/7 coverage matters to you, ask before you commit.

Pricing

touchSMS has the simplest price list of any provider we have reviewed, and also the lowest:

There are no volume tiers. You pay 5c whether you buy 400 credits or 400,000, which means a small business pays the same rate a large sender would have to negotiate for elsewhere. Credits never expire, there is no monthly fee for a prepaid account, no setup fee and no contract. New accounts get 10 free credits to test with. Messages over 160 characters bill as multiple parts in the normal way, and international pricing is on request.

How that compares

Put the headline rates side by side and the gap is wide:

ClickSend’s best published rate needs a ten thousand dollar balance and still comes in above touchSMS’s entry price. Sinch Engage’s best rate is tied to a monthly plan at nearly $800. A sender doing 5,000 messages a month pays about $250 on touchSMS, $360 on ClickSend’s entry tier, and about $350 on Sinch Engage once the plan fee and overage are included.

Virtual numbers follow the same pattern. At $15 per month the touchSMS number is cheaper than ClickSend’s $20.90, and it comes with inbound MMS and no setup fee. The $30 call-forwarding option is worth a look if you want one published number for both texts and calls: it forwards calls to any Australian landline or mobile and includes 100 minutes a month, which is a product neither Sinch brand offers in the same form.

The one thing to keep in mind is that touchSMS quotes ex GST, so Australian businesses that cannot claim it back should add 10%. Even then it stays the cheapest on this site.

APIs and Integrations

SMS API

The API is a REST interface at a single base URL with HTTP basic authentication. You generate a key pair in the dashboard, pass one half as the username and the other as the password, and you are sending. The documentation is published as a Postman collection with runnable examples for every endpoint, which is a practical choice: you can exercise the whole API before writing a line of code.

Batch sending is well above what most providers offer. A single call can carry up to 1,000 messages (10 for MMS), and if some of them fail validation the rest still go out. Each message can carry a scheduled send time, a reporting reference, a campaign name and up to ten key-value pairs of metadata. That metadata comes back on delivery receipts and, importantly, on inbound replies, so matching a reply to the record in your system that triggered the outbound message is done for you. Most APIs make you build that correlation yourself.

Request-level options let you check the whole batch against a named opt-out list and reject duplicate messages or duplicate recipients before anything sends. There is a dry-run endpoint that runs full validation and returns the credit cost and part count without sending, and the live send response reports total credits used and your remaining balance. If you bill SMS through to your own customers, that is the cost data you need without a separate reporting call.

Webhooks are the strongest part of the API:

• Events for inbound messages and delivery status changes
• Payloads signed with HMAC-SHA256 using a per-account secret
• Retries up to 15 times with exponential backoff capped at 12 hours, until your endpoint returns a 2xx
• Subscriptions that fail repeatedly are disabled automatically and flagged, so a dead endpoint is visible rather than silently dropping events
• Custom headers, GET or POST, JSON or form encoding, all manageable through the API as well as the dashboard

Inbound MMS media arrives as direct URLs you download and store yourself. If you cannot receive webhooks there is a polling endpoint for inbound messages, rate limited to 120 requests an hour, which is the right nudge towards webhooks without leaving polling-only systems stranded.

Beyond sending, the API covers contacts, templates, opt-outs and opt-out lists, sender IDs, account details and a separate Verify API for one-time passcodes that handles code generation, delivery and checking so you do not have to build OTP flows yourself. Three fixed test numbers simulate a valid send, an invalid number and an opted-out recipient without touching real handsets or your credit balance, which makes automated integration tests straightforward.

Error handling is explicit: 422 for validation with the offending field named, 402 when credits run out, 401 for bad keys. Official libraries exist for PHP (on Packagist) and Node (on npm). Other languages work against the REST API directly. Throughput limits on the send endpoint are not published, so establish those with support before a very large send.

Email to SMS

Email to SMS is included, and you can register multiple sending addresses on one account. It is the quickest way to add SMS to a system that can already send email, and it works alongside the Microsoft 365 integrations below.

Integrations

This is where touchSMS goes further than we expected from a provider at this price point. The direct integrations cover:

• Microsoft 365: Outlook, Excel, Teams and Power Automate, so you can send from a mailbox, merge from a spreadsheet, run two-way SMS in a Teams channel or drop SMS steps into automated flows
• HubSpot: send and receive SMS against contacts in the CRM
• ActiveCampaign: SMS as an action in automations, and contact sync back into touchSMS
• Slack: send and receive SMS in a chosen channel
• Maropost Commerce Cloud for e-commerce messaging
• Zapier for everything else
• QR codes, web chat and a VoIP option that pairs an SMS-capable number with voice service

There is a WhatsApp offering alongside SMS for teams that need both channels, and touchSMS positions itself as a destination for customers moving off Telstra Desktop Messaging.

Workflows

Virtual numbers can be attached to inbound workflows: keyword-triggered replies with different responses per keyword, time-based auto-responses (an after-hours message, for example), forwarding inbound messages to email or another mobile, and webhook calls out to your own systems. Combined with the metadata and reply-matching in the API, this covers a lot of the automation that would otherwise need Zapier or custom code.

Will touchSMS work for your SMS needs?

For small business

The strongest fit on this site. A $20 minimum purchase, a flat 5c rate, free inbound, credits that never expire and a $15 number mean you can run appointment reminders, two-way customer messaging or occasional campaigns without a plan or a contract. The Microsoft 365 and HubSpot integrations mean most small teams never need to touch the API.

For developers and product teams

Also a strong fit. The metadata and reply-matching, the 1,000-message batches, the dry-run endpoint, the signed and retried webhooks and the test numbers are the things developers usually end up building around a provider’s API. Here they are built in. The only gap against ClickSend is channel breadth: touchSMS does SMS, MMS and OTP, not voice, email or physical post through the same API.

For large organisations

Better than the self-serve pricing suggests. The parent company has an enterprise messaging heritage, there is an enterprise tier with SSO, and the flat 5c rate is below what the Sinch brands publish at any volume. What you should confirm directly are the things enterprise buyers usually need in writing: a published uptime SLA, support hours, and throughput guarantees for very large sends.

Where it does not fit

If you need one API for SMS, voice, email and post, ClickSend’s multi-channel platform is the better match. If you need a named account manager and a negotiated contract as a condition of procurement, that is closer to what Sinch Engage is built around. For everyone else, touchSMS is the provider we would start with.