Written from taking one agent from creation through brand verification to a carrier launch request, against Google’s live API. Everything here cost us days to find.
Sending works, people reply, and nothing reaches your server. Six reasons inbound fails silently — a blank webhook, an agent-level override, a stale URL, a token mismatch — and the three tests that find it before a customer does.
30 August 2026RCS is not the cheaper option: it bills inbound replies that SMS delivers free, and takes weeks longer to launch. What it costs, what it buys, and the one number that decides whether it pays for itself.
30 August 2026Per-agent monthly fees, activation charged per agent or per account, vetting billed per image, and carrier fines passed through to you. For a platform serving many brands these outweigh the traffic cost.
30 August 2026Weeks of brand registration and carrier approval stand between an agent and its first message. How to build and test the whole loop first, and what an API needs to be usable by an agent at all.
30 August 2026RCS bills conversations, not messages — and the trigger depends on your recipient replying twice, which you do not control. Why an abandoned conversation costs more than a completed one, and the fees that dominate a quote at low volume.
26 August 2026All three major US carriers run their own approval and require a commercial agreement Google does not broker. What the region list actually returns, the verification deadlock, and what reaches a handset today.
26 August 2026A required field marked optional, a profile that freezes on request, palette PNGs silently destroyed, and a launch state whose rejected value is not in the published enum. Found by shipping a real agent.
23 August 2026