Questions ops must ask before signing

Procurement can close on price while ops inherits a platform that cannot prove traffic. Before signature, ops needs answers on heartbeat freshness, how numbers are bought JIT, what Live badges mean, and how STOP is enforced. This checklist is for runway readiness — not the SMS API buyer guide that covers payloads and idempotency.

IOSOR day-one truth: a green runway needs a fresh webhook heartbeat, Live only where vault is ready, and compliance gates that stay on. Signing without those answers buys a dashboard that looks open and a send path that is blocked.

Ask who owns the webhook heartbeat clock

Demand the definition of a fresh heartbeat and what happens when it goes stale. Ops must know which alert fires and who unblocks runway when heartbeat age exceeds the gate. A contract that never names the heartbeat owner leaves traffic_ok as a mystery on launch morning.

Ask for the last successful smoke path — not a slide saying “webhooks supported”.

Clarify JIT number buy before promising local DIDs

Ask how a number is searched, held, purchased, and assigned against prepaid balance. JIT means no shop stock pretending to be inventory; finance and ops share one order story. If the term sheet promises “numbers ready in catalog” without a hold-buy-assign path, ops will invent a second ledger.

Require who pays setup and monthly on the first UTC period so finance is not surprised after assign.

Interrogate Live badges versus setup tiles

Ask which products can show Live only after vault green, and what “in setup” means for the buyer. A Live badge that sells a channel ops cannot smoke is a honesty failure. Ops should walk the catalog with the seller and mark any badge that outruns readiness.

Coming-next belongs in roadmap talk, not in the binding launch list for week one.

Confirm STOP and production compliance gates

Ask how STOP keywords are honored, where suppression lives, and which production compliance gates stay enforced for the corridors you will use. Signing without STOP ownership turns the first complaint into a legal and deliverability incident.

Pair STOP answers with the day-one runway checklist so launch does not skip quiet enforcement for speed.

Related ops paths

• SMS API buyer checklist
• What must be green on day-one runway
• Production compliance gates before traffic

Start with IOSOR

Open the console webhook settings to verify who monitors heartbeat timeout alerts and how stale gates trigger system escalations. Test the JIT number search, hold, and assign workflow in your staging project while verifying that STOP suppression tables actively block non-compliant corridors.

IOSOR takeaway

A buyer checklist must enforce operational transparency before contracts are signed. Demanding a clear hold-buy-assign flow for local numbers, explicit webhook heartbeat ownership, and verified Live badge readiness prevents catastrophic launch failures when traffic begins.

Do walk every catalog feature with a technical evaluation to ensure setup tiles match real execution capabilities. Don't accept superficial commercial promises or launch routes without fully audit-tested STOP suppression and production compliance gates.