The price per megabyte is high but the price per SIM card per month is very reasonable. Twilio has never competed on price, it's competed on being the absolute easiest service to integrate with the rest of your infrastructure.

Looks like a good choice if you want a lot of nodes without Wi-Fi to report back a small stream of data each month.

Google Fi is a good deal, but what if you want just a little bit of cell data? Add in the ability to manage fleets of devices with an API. There is a service available now that sells SIMs for IoT applications:

http://neo.aeris.com/

with google fi you can also order extra data sim's with no monthly fee. And they use your phone's $10/gb plan.

Not exactly fair, since this is targeted at lower-usage IoT/sensor use-cases where the difference in price between sending 1MB per day and 2MB per day is pennies.

At these prices, it doesn't make any sense to put it in your phone unless you really like Twilio.

Seems they should at least be pricing it the same as their smartphone pricing. $40 on T-mobile gets me 6GB of data with unlimited voice and SMS (and benefits like international roaming, zero-rated music services, etc), where under this plan it would get me 2GB of data, with no voice or SMS. I have friends in a large group plan who pay under $30/month for 10GB of data and all the other features.

The low bandwitdh pricing is very competitive with existing offerings, though.

Fi is not $10/gig. It's $20+$10/gig. Which for anything IoT is incredibly expensive. There are cheaper options out there.

To be fair, pricing of Twillio has always been outrageous. Competitors are offering similar services for lower costs (for example Nexmo and Plivo).

It's half the price of ting

https://ting.com/rates