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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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