Estimating and deleting

Two operations act on a campaign that already exists. Estimate prices it — how many contacts it would reach, how many message parts that becomes, what it would cost. Delete removes it. Both take the same PROJECT_CAMPAIGN_WRITE scope as creation, and both sit in the restrictive rate-limit class.

They share one property worth understanding before you call either: neither has finished the work by the time it answers you. Each hands back a status and leaves a worker to do the rest, so in both cases the way you learn the outcome is to read the campaign again.

Estimating a draft

PATCH/v1/project/{project}/campaign/{id}/estimate

Start the estimation of a campaign.

The call returns 202 Accepted with the campaign in estimating, and a worker fills in the figures about a minute later. Read the campaign again to collect them: contactsCount and ignoredContactsCount for the reach, preparedUnits for the message parts, and the campaign's price fields for the cost. While the worker is still running the status stays estimating.

The estimate walks that sample and extrapolates, deliberately erring on the high side, so the real cost of the send is never above the figure you get back.

The states the endpoint accepts are draft, preview, estimated, quoted and prepared. See Statuses and phases for what each one means.

A 409 here is not only about state

This is the refusal an integration actually runs into, and the status alone will not explain it. The campaign also has to be complete. Every declared language needs its copy and a sender, so a draft missing its copy, missing a sender, or carrying a language declared and left empty is refused with the same 409 while sitting in a perfectly valid draft.

RCS adds a second gate: the SMS fallback leg has to be complete too, unless the campaign has no fallback or skips it. An RCS campaign whose own message is finished can still be refused because the fallback it inherited from the project has no sender — the part that fails is one the caller never wrote. The no-default-sender and no-fallback-sender warnings returned at creation are what tell you this is coming.

Deleting a campaign

DELETE/v1/project/{project}/campaign/{id}

Delete a campaign.

Anything that has not gone out can be deleted: a draft or preview, a campaign already estimated or quoted, one already prepared, and one still scheduled while its send time is more than five minutes away. A campaign that is sending, sent, aborted or unpaid is refused with 409, and so is a scheduled one inside that five-minute edition window — for a campaign already on its way, cancelling in the dashboard is the alternative.

A campaign mid-calculation cannot be deleted either — neither estimating nor quoting is a deletable state, and this is the refusal most likely to surprise you, because you caused it yourself a moment earlier. If you have just started an estimate and want to undo it, wait for it to land and delete the campaign after.

The 204 does not always mean it is gone

The response is 204 No Content — there is no body to read, by design. And the deletion is not always immediate:

The campaign was	What happens
draft, preview, estimated, quoted	Gone by the time the call returns.
prepared or scheduled	Moved to deleted first. A worker removes its prepared messages before the campaign itself goes, so it keeps appearing in listings for a short while.

With no body to tell the two apart, read the campaign again: a 404 means it is gone, and a campaign still there in deleted means the cleanup is running and will finish on its own. Neither is an error, and an integration that treats a post-delete 404 as a failure will report problems that did not happen.

What's next