Sending SMS to Bangladesh

Bangladesh is not a difficult SMS market. It is an under-documented one. The constraints are stable and knowable, but they are spread across operator policy, aggregator convention and things people only discover in production — so most integrations here are written twice.

This page is the short version of everything that will affect your code.

What is the phone number format for Bangladesh?

Every Bangladeshi mobile number is +880, then an operator digit, then eight digits — fifteen characters including the +. Nishchit validates against +8801[3-9] and eight digits, and rejects anything else at validation rather than letting a carrier discard it silently.

+8801712345678      valid
01712345678         valid input — normalised to +8801712345678
+8801212345678      rejected — operator digit 2 is not assigned
+919812345678       rejected — unsupported_country

Nishchit normalises the common local forms (01712345678, 8801712345678) to E.164 before validating, so you do not have to. A number outside Bangladesh fails with unsupported_country; a malformed Bangladeshi number fails with invalid_recipient.

Can I confirm that a message was delivered?

On the primary Bangladesh route, no. That route returns no delivery receipts, so messages sent over it terminate at sent with unknown and stay there permanently. This is the single most important fact on this page, and it is the one most commonly left unsaid.

Nishchit keeps two independent fields rather than collapsing them into one, because collapsing them is what forces a messaging product to invent a delivery confirmation it never received.

A message that reads status: "sent", delivery_status: "unknown" has not failed. It means Nishchit handed it to the carrier successfully and the network never said what happened next. If your interface renders unknown as a failure — or as a success — it will be wrong for most of your traffic.

Why does Bangla text cost about three times as much?

Because SMS is billed per segment, and an SMS carries a fixed 140 bytes of user data. GSM-7 packs seven bits per character into those 140 bytes, giving 160 characters. Bangla has no representation in the GSM 03.38 alphabet, so a single Bangla character forces the entire body into UCS-2 at sixteen bits per character — 70 characters per segment.

The same notification, in both languages, through the engine that actually bills:

Almost identical length. One segment against three. This is not a Nishchit surcharge and no provider can avoid it — it is how the GSM standard has counted characters since 1985. What varies between providers is whether they tell you. Bangla SMS works through the full encoding rules, and you can measure any body yourself with the segment calculator.

Do I need a registered sender ID?

For an alphanumeric (masking) sender on the major networks, yes — and it takes weeks.

Twilio's published Bangladesh SMS guidelines, checked 11 September 2026, state that sender ID registration is required for Grameenphone, Robi/Axiata and Teletalk; that international pre-registration takes approximately three weeks; and that messages carrying unregistered sender IDs to those three networks have been blocked since 8 September 2025. The same page records that two-way SMS is not supported in Bangladesh, and that long codes and short codes are not supported on the major networks.

Nishchit's answer to this in V1 is a managed shared sender. You are not required to register anything, submit a trade licence, or wait three weeks before your first message — you send on a Nishchit-managed numeric sender from signup. Customer-owned sender IDs are on the roadmap and are not available yet, which is a real limitation and is stated here rather than discovered later.

What content is not allowed?

Nishchit runs no KYC. Signup is self-serve and live access is immediate, which only works because every message is inspected before it reaches a carrier. Content Guard classifies each body as OTP, transactional, promotional or unknown, applies the published policy, and logs the verdict with the rule-set version that produced it.

That trade is deliberate: you are not blocked for three weeks by a document review, and in exchange the rules are enforced per message. They are published in full at content policy — read them before you hit one. A blocked message is rejected before the carrier and costs no credits.

New projects also start on a low-volume trust tier with a daily ceiling that is independent of your credit balance, and it lifts automatically. See rate limits.

What does it cost?

One credit buys one SMS segment, at a flat ৳0.35. No monthly minimum, no per-seat charge, no setup fee, no sender-ID registration fee, and credits do not expire. Test-mode traffic is never billed, and a message blocked by content policy is never billed.

The number that matters is not the per-SMS rate — it is the segment count, which is why the Bangla question above decides most invoices. Full rate card and a calculator on pricing.

What you cannot do in Bangladesh

Stated together, because every one of these has cost somebody a sprint:

• Receive replies. Two-way SMS is not available. Do not design a STOP-handling loop that depends on inbound messages reaching you — carry opt-out through your own channels.
• Confirm delivery on the primary route. No receipts are returned. See above.
• Send to a non-Bangladeshi number. Nishchit is BD-only and will reject it at validation.
• Use your own brand name as a sender today. Managed senders only in V1.
• Fit a useful Bangla message into one segment. 70 characters is roughly eight to ten Bangla words.

Still choosing a provider

Every constraint on this page is a property of the Bangladesh market rather than of any one vendor, so it will hold whoever you pick. Choosing an SMS API in Bangladesh compares the three kinds of provider and gives you seven questions to put to any of them — including Nishchit.

Start here