Phone Numbers

Long Codes vs Short Codes

For most companies, buying a short code is prohibitively expensive. Short-codes also have the reputation of not coming from a human.

Nevertheless, Sonar works well with short codes, and we can provide these short codes after a minimal application process.

Sonar has been optimized to run over regular 10 (and 9, depending on the country) digit phone numbers. The greatest advantage of short codes is that they have greater throughput - you can send many messages per second from one number. Apart from the price, the other disadvantage of
short codes is that they are perceived as robotic and spammy.

Long-codes are by far more advantageous. They are cheap ($1 per number in the US) and feel much more personal - ideal for 2-way messaging and relationship building.

Since most companies prefer to use long-codes, Sonar has optimized their utility.

Phone Numbers

When you get a Sonar account, we buy a phone number for you. Each customer that you text will only see messages from one number.

If you already have a phone number that you'd like to use with Sonar, we can host that number for you as well (so long as it's not a mobile phone number).

If your use case requires more than one phone number, we can handle that also. Just let us know!

To display the latest and most available phone number on your website and mobile apps, use the Available Phone Number API.

Determine Phone Number For Outbound Message

In order to see which of your phone numbers an outbound message went out from, you can hover over the message in the dashboard: