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Comment by shaqbert | Hacker News Reader

Net loss: Don't think that is a biggie. They expanded their cost base both in R&D, sales & marketing, and general and admin. With a little bit of cost discipline for one year, they are going to be profitable.

Voting rights: that is indeed yucky.

Competitive threat: Not really. The inertia for existing customers is high, especially since the average revenue per active account is about $580/month. For a big company, that is not worth optimizing. And switching to another (unproven) API from a running system... not likely.

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A list of their competitors: https://www.quora.com/Who-are-Twilios-competitors.

As a Twilio customer that spends maybe ~$500 /mo i'll look at any alternative that allows me to send meta data or allows some process to have a foreign key allowing me to persist conversations in a sane manner (and I'm currently researching just that).

Twilio also does not have their own network, so competitors like Bandwidth that have their own network will be able to compete on price. That said current Twilio pricing is not prohibitive in our market and thus isn't a factor for us researching alternatives currently.

I suggest that you look at Tropo (https://www.tropo.com/). They provide the option to run your script on their servers. I find it's much easier to program non-trivial conversations that way.

Twilio is a Bandwidth customer.

Bandwidth launched a competitive product over two years ago: https://catapult.inetwork.com/pages/home.jsf

The fact that no one here has mentioned it is telling.

Also many of the SMS and MMS companies sign contracts for X messages per month with the telecom companies. If they have a slow month where they can't fulfill the obligations of the contract they'll resell their remaining capacity to another company in the space.

>a little bit of cost discipline for one year

So, layoffs?

Or just continued growth without adding headcount.

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