Use iMessages instead of Twilio
If you’ve been using Twilio, MessageBird, or any other SMS service, you’re familiar with the grind: register for 10DLC, verify your business, wait for carrier approval, pay per message, and then hope your texts don’t get filtered.
The current iMessage API market (and why it’s expensive)
A few companies sell iMessage APIs: Sendblue, Linq, and a handful of others. They work. But they come with trade-offs that matter:
You get a new, dedicated phone number. Not your number. A number your customers have never seen before. When they get a message from it, they don’t know who you are. Some will ignore it. Some will report it as spam.
Monthly fees add up. Plans typically start at $29–49/month plus per-message costs. If you’re a small business sending a few hundred messages a month, that’s a real expense for something your iPhone can do natively.
Someone else controls your messaging. These services run Mac Mini farms - racks of Apple computers in data centers that relay messages on your behalf. If their service goes down, your messages stop. If they change their pricing, you pay more. If Apple pressures them, you’re affected.
Registration and setup take time. You need to create an account, verify your identity, provision a number, integrate their API (or hire someone to do it), and then test everything before you send your first message.
For large enterprises sending tens of thousands of messages, these services make sense. But for small businesses, solo operators, real estate agents, healthcare practices, and service providers? There’s a simpler path.
The iPhone Shortcuts approach: your phone, your number, free
Apple built a powerful automation tool right into every iPhone: Shortcuts. It’s the app with the blue and pink overlapping squares that you’ve probably never opened.
Here’s what most people don’t know: Shortcuts can send iMessages automatically. It can also connect to the internet, read data from websites, and run on a schedule. Put those capabilities together, and your iPhone becomes an iMessage sending machine - using your real number, at no cost.
The basic idea:
- You queue messages through a simple web dashboard or API
- A Shortcut running on your iPhone checks for new messages
- It sends each one as an iMessage, from your number
- It reports back that the message was sent
- It waits, then checks again
Your customer sees a blue bubble from the same number they’ve always known. They reply normally. You see their reply. It’s just… texting. But automated.
The catch: it’s technical to set up yourself
If you have a technical background - or a developer on your team - you can build this yourself. We wrote a full technical guide on exactly how to do it: the Shortcut architecture, the backend API, the polling loop, and all the gotchas.
But those gotchas are real:
iOS kills automations that run too long. Your Shortcut will stop without warning, and you need a mechanism to restart it.
No delivery confirmations. The Shortcut sends the message, but you don’t get a receipt that it was delivered.
Text only. No images, no attachments - just plain text through the automated path.
Unpredictable SMS fallback. Sometimes the Shortcut sends SMS instead of iMessage, even when the recipient supports iMessage. You can’t control this.
Receiving messages is complicated. Building a true two-way system requires workarounds that aren’t straightforward.
If you’re comfortable navigating these constraints and building your own backend, the DIY approach is genuinely viable. It’s how we started.
Or use a tool that’s already solved these problems
We built texting.blue because we hit every one of those problems and didn’t want anyone else to have to solve them from scratch.
Here’s what it does:
Uses your iPhone, your number. You install a Shortcut on your phone and connect it to your texting.blue account. That’s it. Messages go out from your real number.
Web dashboard for non-technical users. No code required. Queue messages, view conversations, manage contacts - all from a simple web interface. If you can use email, you can use texting.blue.
Smart rate limiting built in. The system automatically paces your messages with human-like delays between sends. You set daily limits, and it respects them. This is critical for keeping your account safe (Apple can restrict accounts that send too many messages too fast).
Two-way conversations. When someone replies, you see it in your dashboard. You can respond manually or set up automated responses.
Webhooks for automation. If you do want to connect it to your CRM, Zapier, or custom app - the API and webhooks are there. But they’re optional, not required.
Chat widget for your website. This is one of the most important features, and it’s easy to miss: we give you an embeddable widget that lets website visitors click to message you directly. They open their Messages app, send you a text, and now you have a conversation thread. Because they messaged you first, the “Report Junk” option never appears. This is the safest way to start iMessage conversations with new customers.
The real comparison: Twilio SMS vs. iMessage from your iPhone
| Twilio SMS | texting.blue (iMessage) | |
|---|---|---|
| Per-message cost | $0.0079+ per segment | Free (no per-message fees) |
| Your phone number | No - you get a Twilio number | Yes - your real iPhone number |
| 10DLC registration | Required (weeks of paperwork) | Not needed |
| Bulk messaging | Yes | No - you can be blocked by Apple |
The trade-off is honest: Twilio handles massive scale (millions of messages) and works on any phone, not just iPhones. If your audience is primarily Android users or you need to send 50,000 messages a day, SMS with Twilio or similer provider is the right choice.
But if you’re a small-to-medium business communicating primarily with US customers - where iPhones dominate - then you’re overpaying for an inferior channel. Your messages are landing as green bubbles that get filtered, ignored, and reported, when they could be arriving as blue bubbles that get opened, read, and answered.
Getting started
If you want to try the DIY approach, check out our technical guide for developers - it walks through the full Shortcut setup step by step.
If you’d rather skip the engineering and start messaging today, texting.blue has a small fee tier. Set up takes about five minutes: create an account, install the Shortcut on your iPhone, and send your first automated iMessage.
Your iPhone has been capable of this all along. It just needed a little help.