readynum vs SMS-Activate

Five behaviours, compared

The honest verdict

The ticks in that table are ours to prove, and each one is a commitment enforced in the product: every displayed rate carries a source label, every price renders in the page before any signup, the minimum deposit never exceeds the price of one order, and a failed delivery refunds your wallet automatically — the full policy is on the refunds page. The dashes are not accusations. They mean exactly what the footnote says: we could not verify the behaviour on SMS-Activate's public pages, so we print nothing.

We won't claim to be the only site that publishes a success rate — others in the category publish figures too. The claim we will make is about us: every figure on this site names its source, and where we have none we say so. Today that honesty is mostly visible as the sentence “We don't have data for this route yet” across much of our own pricing table. That is the designed launch state, not a defect: figures appear as real orders accumulate, each with its sample size and time window.

And to be fair to the other column even now: what we verified on 3 August 2026 reflects well on how they left. They did not silently vanish — every path on sms-activate.org serves a plain-language farewell page in five languages that names its dates and answers the questions users actually had, and it states that the withdrawal deadline went to every user by email and in their bot. It even protects former users from impostors: “Our name goes away with us. If you find a service called SMS-Activate, then be sure they are scammers.” Ten years of operation preceded that page — their own count; we can verify the sentence, not the decade. All of it is on their site today, and you can re-check every word.

When SMS-Activate might suit you better

This section is not a formality. There are real cases where the incumbent is the sensible choice:

• First, the honest caveat this section needs: none of these cases can end with you using SMS-Activate, because their own site says the service is closed. What follows is the closest this page can come to fairness — where to look if what you valued was theirs.
• You want the nearest thing to what they built: their farewell page says they handed their technologies to the HeroSMS team and recommends trying it (their recommendation, read 3 August 2026). We have not audited HeroSMS and can vouch neither for nor against it — check it yourself before funding anything.
• You valued their decade of history: that kind of record is real currency in this category, and no new service — ours included — can offer it. If a long track record is your first filter, pick a still-operating incumbent and verify its terms on its own pages.
• You held a balance there: we have nothing better to offer than their own notice — withdrawals ended February 5 and, in their words, “there is no one who can deal with your requests”. Read that sentence before parking money with any provider, ours included. It is why our deposit rule exists: Minimum deposit never exceeds the price of one order. Your balance never expires.

Why every figure here carries a source label

The quote we would normally put here is a user review, shown with the vendor's public reply. A closed service can no longer reply to anyone, so we quote the vendor's own farewell page instead — the sentence every balance-holder found when the service ended. We show it not because SMS-Activate handled its exit badly (by category standards the notice is unusually clear), but because it is what an advertised promise, or a prepaid balance, is ultimately backed by at any provider whose claims you cannot verify from the outside:

Our answer to that is not a better advertised number — it's the label. On readynum, a rate is either measured from our own orders and shown with its sample size and window, a named supplier's figure passed through and marked as theirs, or the sentence “We don't have data for this route yet”. Most of our routes show the third state today, and we own that. We would rather print that sentence than sell what the reviewer above paid for.

Questions, answered plainly