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Comment by johns | Hacker News Reader

Really? One per minute per number? That's a pretty big limitation.

Edit: I think Danielle just mistyped. From the FAQ: "Each of your Twilio SMS-enabled phone numbers can send SMS messages at a rate of 1 message per second. You can make requests to Twilio as fast as you like, and Twilio will queue the messages, releasing them at a rate of 1 message per second. It is not possible to adjust this rate."

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Eek yes, 1 msg per second per number... I think it's time for me to go to bed.

danielle (@twilio)

Either way, imagine you need to send out 100 messages. That would be 100 seconds (or even worse 100 minutes.) Imagine if you needed to send out 1,000 or a million. Its going to be hard to build a solely SMS service around this based on that limitation. I think this is awesome if you want to add SMS alerts to your existing website or build a proof of concept, but I don't think your going to build an SMS app on top of this API.

The point is: you buy more phone numbers at $1/month to increase your capacity.

Well if your service is sending out 100 messages in one second then you can probably afford the $1-$2/month charge to add more numbers.

Especially since you are already paying $3 per minute for the 100 messages.

http://www.twilio.com/pricing-signup says that it's 3 cents/SMS - which, yes, works out to be $3 - but not because it's per minute.

My point is that you have 86,400 seconds in a day. Well before you are spending $864 per day maxing out the number of messages you can send, you have $1 in the bank to get another number.

But then again, having a bank of 100 phone numbers just to send the million messages you want to send within an hour sounds slightly annoying from a logistics perspective.

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