How do I set up country rate limits?

To protect your account from sudden bill shocks, e.g. from SMS pumping/AIT attacks, the country rate limit tool expands the existing geo permissions tool by letting you configure daily SMS caps for individual countries. Once a country reaches its daily allowance, additional messages are automatically blocked. 

This tool is free of charge and all accounts that use the new Mobile Messaging API have access to it.

When your outbound volume hits the configured daily cap for a destination, our system stops subsequent messages from processing. You incur zero charges for these blocked outbound attempts.

We send a delivery report (DLR) webhook for every blocked message. The webhook provides error code 0x1908 alongside the message: 

“Destination blocked – geo restrictions applied”.

 

Step 1: Open geo permissions

From your dashboard: Select Fraud Prevention → Geo Permissions

 

Step 2: Enable geo permissions and add countries

• Turn on geo permissions.
• Select and add the countries you want to allow messaging to.

Note: All countries you do not add will automatically be blocked.

 

Step 3: Configure country rate limits 

• Click the three dots next to the country under Actions → Edit limits.
• Switch to Daily limit and enter number of messages allowed.
• Click Save.

Note: This feature is not supported on the legacy REST API, and a warning will appear if you attempt to use it there.

All country counters reset automatically every day at 00:00 UTC. As soon as midnight UTC arrives, your configured daily quotas refresh, allowing normal message routing to resume right away.

Yes. You can configure the “rest of the world” setting to assign a single default daily rate limit per country across all remaining destinations simultaneously. 

This helps protect your account from fraud, while still allowing you to send messages to all countries.

Country rate limits apply strictly to SMS traffic submitted through these options:

• Mobile Messaging API
• SMPP

If you send traffic through our legacy REST API, countries on your allowed list remain unlimited under the standard geo permission setup. Read our guide here on how to change from the REST API to our new Mobile Messaging API. 

RCS messaging is not included in the tool, and therefore remains entirely unrestricted across all connections.

Concatenated SMS messages can occasionally cause a brief, intentional cap overflow. For example, if your limit stands at 100 messages and you have sent 99, a two-segment message will pass through successfully. This brings your daily number of messages to 101, after which all subsequent outbound attempts to that country face immediate blocks.

No. Raising a daily country rate limit permits new traffic to flow through immediately. However, it does not trigger a resend of messages rejected earlier in the day. Dropped messages remain permanently cancelled.