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Comment by kevinburke | Hacker News Reader

This has been kicked around for a really long time and I'm happy they finally launched it.

Around 2013 or so, one of the junior engineers on the Twilio Voice team pitched his innovation week project with a single slide saying "Fax: The time is now." The time has finally arrived! Congrats John.

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Guessing this will kill Phaxio. Compare the pricing:

https://www.twilio.com/fax/pricing

https://www.phaxio.com/pricing/

it's amazing that phaxio have gotten away with such high prices for so long.

All the eFax providers have been doing this.

When your user-base is comprised of doctors, lawyers and blue-chip companies with ancient business processes you can get away with charging what you like.

And when your user base is developers without knowledge of the underlying fundamentals, you can charge how Twilio does. The knife, it cuts both ways.

Until you know the use case, pricing is a nebulous concept.

I'm not sure the Phaxio pricing is all that much higher than Twilio. They're covering failed faxes, cancelled faxes, faxes that require multiple retries, and faxes that just take a long time — only charging per page delivered. Those will all eat up minutes that you'll pay for with Twilio.

In any case, their pricing model has been far preferable to their old competitor, Interfax: https://www.interfax.net/en/prices

We (Twilio) are also only charging for successful delivery. Failures to not incur any billing. Retry is (currently) on the customer to implement, but since we don't charge for failures, that doesn't affect cost.

Yes, we're charging per-minute fees, but for US, at least, it's sub-1-cent, and with my testing so far, I haven't seen it go more than a couple minutes per page for something fairly complex, and that's worst case.

Someone else in this business says they see 1 minute for 1 page faxes, but faster for longer faxes...Because the first page has the initial handshake.

http://www.faxage.com/learn_faxing_by_minutes_versus_faxing_...

I'm sure some pages take longer, but it doesn't seem odd that most pages aren't complex.

Phaxio founder here.

Our pricing might seem higher (and may be in certain situations), but it works a bit differently that Twilio's. Twilio charges you the 1c _plus_ the costs of the call. Phaxio is an "all in" rate _including_ retrying the call. And, at Phaxio, if the calls all fail there's no cost to you.

I'm not saying that we won't adjust our pricing (#competition), but there's a difference in the actual unit cost.

How long does it take, on average, to send a page?

How long does it take to send a page of fax? Their pricing is 0.007 per minute. I haven't seen many fax machines take more than a minute per page, but they would have to take 10 minutes to catch up to your pricing.

Edit: Fixed time to comparable pricing.

Quick answer is that it depends on what's on the page. It can be as quick as a minute or significantly longer if there are images or lots of data the page.

That's fair but how many pages take more than 10 minutes?

I'd be surprised to see more than a couple minutes for even a complicated fax page. I've seen 45-70 seconds average for a not-too-complicated page.

It also depends on the baud rate (never thought that term would come back, eh?) negotiated between both ends. A 14400 baud transmission will of course be faster than 9600.

I paid $10 to send a 28 page fax. I absolutely believe utility and govt companies still use fax because they want to make somethings very hard for the average customer. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to send an email a pdf to show good credit so they don't charge me a deposit fee.

Twilio please build a mobile app so those of us who don't live with typewriters and fax machines can deal with our nasty govt.

Where in the government do you still have to fax things?

This had me curious, so I tried googling for

  site: *.gov fax

Was surprised at the results. It may not be the only conduit, but it is there for job applications, VA benefits, applying for a headstone in a national cemetery, court filings, IRS documents, and much more.

The FBI recently stopped accepting FOIA requests online and now online accept them via fax and snail mail.

They did it deliberately to reduce the number of requests.

10 minutes not 1000 minutes

Long time user of Phaxio. We tried many other services and your seems the be the best when it comes to crunching documents - Word, PDF, Images, you name it.

I don't know how Twilio does it, but unless one day in 100 years from now we will be sending 1 million faxes, we will be reluctant to switch and probably save ourselves a headache just to save few bucks a month.

After reading these arguments I was expecting something in the range of dollars per fax.

Is 7 cents per page really that much? I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff, but are there really that many places out there faxing thousands of pages where 7 cents per page vs 5 cents per page is really going to make a difference for them?

There isn't consensus on the 5 cents per page part. Some think it is closer to 3. If that's true, generally, I'm concerned if a competitor launches at less than half my price.

Even if it is 5 cents, that's a 30% discount, which seems significant.

It makes a difference at high volumes.

Rumors of the demise of telecom services based on their competitors' feature set and pricing are greatly exaggerated.

https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comme...

This is a smaller, more niche market though. Not just the "fax" or "online fax", but specifically "fax API" slice. There are not many players.

Some of our customers have been using foiply : https://www.foiply.com/pricing-monthly/

The difference in pricing will certainly make them consider a switch.

Actually though! This has been an internal meme since then, there's been PRs for implementing it just hanging around for years =P I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't an April Fools joke.

Congrats Twilio!

Depends on what time zone you're in ;)

Or download FreeSWITCH and roll your own. :)

I have previously integrated with eFax in 2010, so an internet fax provider is not new to me, but forgive my ignorance as I haven't visited the space in a while. Which innovation are you excited about and referring to? From the comments it seems to be 'developer friendly API' or 'Simplicity in pricing' as the to big draws, just curious what has changed since my last days?

Being "developer-friendly" can be a big draw. Take Stripe for example. It's an HTTP API with bindings in a number of languages. Previously I worked with a payment processor that required we run some sort of Java application even though we weren't a Java shop. Someone had to setup a way to wrap the Java application to interface with the payment processor (not even getting into the issue that now we have to deal with running a JVM-based application). Some companies are actively developer hostile in their interfaces.

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