Case study
One line, every message kept.
Client texting ran through a third-party automation platform that relayed messages onward and kept no durable record. Nobody could answer what had been said to a client, or when.
The problem
One phone number served the whole firm: prospects, active clients, and anyone replying to an automated reminder. Messages arrived at a platform that forwarded them to whoever seemed relevant and retained nothing. There was no single place to answer the question a client file most often needs answered — what have we actually told this person?
The decision that made it work
One system owns arrival. Everything else owns its own state. The hub is the only thing that talks to the carrier: it stores each message once, keyed on the carrier's own identifier so a redelivery cannot create a duplicate, then forwards it to whichever systems care. Those systems decide independently what counts as unread, or as needing a reply.
The alternative — several systems each subscribing to the carrier directly — produces several partial records and no authoritative one.
- Idempotent on the carrier's message identifier, so retries and redeliveries collapse onto one row
- A retry sweep for anything that failed to reach a downstream system, bounded rather than infinite
- An append-only error log for everything that failed loudly — invalid signatures, failed forwards, failed posts
- No anonymous database access at all; every read goes through a server route
Nothing sends without asking
Before any outbound message leaves, the hub asks the system of record whether that person may be contacted. If it cannot get an answer — the other system is down, the network is slow — it sends nothing. It does not assume yes.
That is the whole argument for failing closed. A delayed text is recoverable. A text to someone who asked you to stop is not.
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