How can I send an SMS directly with AWS SNS in n8n?

The AWS SNS node in n8n currently supports only the Publish operation to a topic. This means that sending an SMS directly to a phone number is not available out of the box with this node.

If you need to send an SMS directly using AWS SNS, you have a couple of options:

• Use a Topic with SMS Subscriptions:
  Create an AWS SNS topic and subscribe the phone number (or multiple numbers) to it using the SMS protocol. Then, when you publish a message to that topic from n8n, AWS SNS will forward the SMS to the subscribed phone number(s).

• Use a Custom API Call:
  Although the AWS SNS API does support sending SMS messages directly by specifying the PhoneNumber parameter when calling the Publish action, the n8n AWS SNS node doesn’t expose that functionality. As a workaround, you could use n8n’s HTTP Request node to directly call the AWS SNS Publish API with the proper AWS Signature Version 4 authentication and include the PhoneNumber parameter. This approach, however, requires additional setup to handle authentication and constructing the correct request format.

In summary, n8n’s built-in AWS SNS node does not support sending SMS directly to a number; you’ll need to either use an SNS topic with an SMS subscription or build a custom call with the HTTP Request node.