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the_common_man

Twilio is really a one trick pony. As messaging apps proliferate, the need for sms/telephony will slowly die out.

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Not sure I would say that. They have voice, video, messaging, SIP, etc. They have a lot of tricks.

They've got a lot of attempts to expand to similar markets, but the problem is that most are second class.

Twilio is the market leader for developer SMS, and voice.

They are not the market leader for any of the other categories that they are trying to expand to.

Not yet.

As someone looking to work with both programmable video messaging and SIP trunking in the very near future, can you name competitors that do it better?

Look at bandwidth.com for SIP trunking.

Edit: if I recall correctly from many years ago, this is who Twilio uses for their US telecom/CLEC interface.

Edit 2: yep, bandwidth.com now even competes against Twilio: https://getvoip.com/amp/blog/2016/06/01/twilio-alternatives/

It doesn't matter. Pick a competitor at random and the competitor will be 100X cheaper.

Twilio is good at one thing. And that is the developer experience.

If you are willing to pay 100X the price, in order to have awesome documentation, then Twilio is the right solution for you.

Otherwise.... Well.... Anything else is probably better.

If that's true, it's hard to imagine why anyone at Uber's size is still using Twilio.

Because big contracts give companies leverage for discounts. Netflix, for example, pays way less than AWS on demand pricing.

100X the price? When it comes to SIP trunking at least, Twilio is one of the cheapest[0] if not the cheapest pay per minute provider. Compare with Flowroute[1] for instance, another popular SIP trunking provider, Twilio is significantly cheaper, especially on origination.

[0] https://www.twilio.com/sip-trunking/pricing [1] https://www.flowroute.com/pricing/

They bought Authy as well.

For the observable future telephony is the only thing that guarantees that a connection will get to you now. And sms-s have very good track records of getting them while your coverage is spotty.

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/04/twilio-notify-public-bet...

Not really. If you're a business that needs to text your customers, you'd much rather use one API to send SMS messages than have to dick around with FB messenger, WhatsApp, etc.

I think an SMS/WhatsApp/WeChat/Hangouts/FBMessenger bridge could be an even more useful service than just an SMS bridge.

There's a YC company called Front that does more or less this: https://frontapp.com/

We use this at work for talking to customers and it works fine, but note that they use Twilio under the hood IIRC.

Also their SPA app is what you'd expect from JavaScript apps—buggy and prone to slowness once it reaches a certain scale.

WhatsApp would be huge. A WhatsApp PBX, auto-responders, etc. But it seems like FB would nix access pretty quickly so you'd constantly be playing whack-a-mole. They might even terminate the underlying account, making it too risky for businesses to even consider.

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