Twilio Launches Roll-Your-Own Google Voice | Hacker News Reader

Twilio Launches Roll-Your-Own Google Voice

gigaom.com

121 pointsmalbiniak39 comments

Every awesome idea I had for using Twilio (and other such services) was shelved because of their 3cpm pricing.

They really do need to work on pricing. I'm not saying it needs to be cheaper, or more expensive, rather that the way it's sold is wrong. Sometimes I want to bill the customer (sub accounts?) for the time, sometimes I want to take it out of my own balance, and other times I'd rather just have a plan with overage charges.

That said, the $30 trial account thing is an amazing hook-in.

I'm with you. It sounds like for any application that would use Twilio extensively, it might be better to roll your own. (not that I know how exactly, but I've read here someone saying it wasn't too big of a deal)

For example, if you have an app where one user would need to be on the phone say 6 hours a day, (could see that easily for customer support or sales) it goes to over $200 a month for a single user. You can probably find products and markets where that's fine but, it's difficult when compared to the typical price range of web-apps. Unless Twilio offers better pricing if you're a heavy user…

However, for applications where calls or text messages are a nice addition and not the core, it's nice to have services like these available.

If you want to roll your own, you can use the Asterisk open-source telephony platform (http://www.asterisk.org/) and use one of the many VOIP wholesale telecom providers. Just to level-set, long distance calls within the US from a wholesale provider with very little volume commitments can go for $0.001cpm.

Do you (or anyone else) happen to have any recommendations as far as low-cost SIP providers? I've been looking around lately and I haven't seen any that jumped out.

Flowroute: http://www.flowroute.com/

Good prices, great service, awesome call quality, and a web interface that doesn't suck. Calling 800 numbers is free and they support T.38. This is the last provider you'll need to evaluate :)

bandwidth.com - DIDs are 0.17$/month (800#'s are 0.25$/month), 2-way trunk for 30$ unlimited US, and awesome technical support.

Support story: We had some site in Texas making random calls to our 800# over the course of like 2 months before we noticed- hundreds of different CLIDs. They helped us identify it, and gave us a credit for three months for our trouble.

Hm, I couldn't find a price list for DIDs starting at 17 cents. Where is that? It seems like the only way to get a quote is to use that request-a-quote form.

Hrm. I hadn't noticed. I just looked at my bill.

It might be regional, or based on availability.

http://www.voip.ms

Agreed. They could become an amazing conduit for innovation if they switched their pricing model to being subscription-based by account, or per-user within the account.

Either way, it needs to be a flat fee. The per-minute price point sucks because because for webapps, they would need to pass that cost on directly to the customers, and it would be variable, and customers would never pay it.

Imagine if your application was some sort of dialer app, and you wanted to use twilio for transcription. To connect, users click on a number in your app, twilio dials you, then dials the contact you are calling. That's cool, but if you have a customer doing that 10 hours a day all day, there's no way they would pay $.06/minute for that. No way.

Twilio, you listening? Get a subscription-based pricing model now and watch as the flood gates open!

That and the price is pretty high for per-minute usage. Anyone doing anything "for real" would probably want lower cost over ease of development. Right now their prices are probably 30x more expensive than your standard voip termination company.

The pricing backlash is fascinating to me, because it appears that it's not that Twilio is overpriced but more that OpenVBX is appealing to consumers/prosumers that Twilio wasn't really reaching before.

So now I'm curious what's next: Does Twilio go after a non-b2b market? They could add a $X/mo unlimited usage plan with whatever caveats they need to make it financially affordable, or they could ignore the market and chase the simpler, more lucrative b2b side they're already good at.

Option #3: Somebody does OpenVBX as a service with predictable billing. They get to take on the marketing and support burdens of dealing with the $9 a month subscribers, and the fact that per-user usage (and hence per-user charges) is all over the map gets concealed by the Plans page. That company pays Twilio a few hundred or thousand bucks a month, in whatever fashion makes sense for their accounting practices.

I considered doing this as my Twilio app, prior to OpenVBX actually existing, but the field was crazy-crowded and I figured the idea appeals disproportionately to cheapskates and frauds. You get to pick your customers. Non-technical ladies who actually pay money for things, I choose you!

But would Twilio really be the right choice to offer this kind of service? I know they make your life easier but this could be done elsewhere for much, much cheaper.

On that note, have you thought about a switch of service in the future for your Appointment Reminder service? I'm sure it's nice to not have certain problems they take care of at this stage but down the road you could cut your costs down to a third (or less) of Twilio.

(I ask because I'm contemplating some ideas that could make use of telephony services and I respect your opinion.)

On that note, have you thought about a switch of service in the future for your Appointment Reminder service?

I will probably not be switching. I am fortunate to be in industries where costs are rounding error next to traditional ones, and time spent optimizing for costs has never made sense next to the marginal revenue I could get by taking the same time and putting it to use marketing, engineering, or marketeering. (The exception is advertising costs, because optimizing for those has superscalar returns due to how AdWords works.)

I don't have data yet for Appointment Reminder, obviously, but I expect that Twilio will consume a fairly small portion of my revenue. I'm ecstatic to give that to them in return for getting to use a programming paradigm that I'm very familiar with and have automatic tight integration between the phone and web parts of my offering. (See my blog later for examples of what you can do with that for UX. It is pretty amazing.)

This is similar to why I pay for Slicehost when there are cheaper offerings elsewhere, instantly: it works well and respects my time.

As always, I'm open to the possibility of changing when (not if) reality whacks me upside the head and tells me that everything I know is wrong, but I rather strongly suspect that "Twilio will turn out to be pretty cheap" is not the hypothesis that is a source of risk for my business.

The pricing issue seems to be very dependent on the application.

[Note: I am under the impression that Twilio charges $0.03/min for both outgoing and incoming calls -- is that correct?]

Across two projects which are 90% inbound calls (basically office PBXes with some simple voicemail/etc), I've been using VoicePulse for SIP origination/termination [1], with an Asterisk instance running on a web server VPS, since 2007. It's currently $13.95/month for one local phone number, with up to 4 simultaneous channels, and free inbound calls. Outbound US calls are typically about $0.015 to $0.020/minute.

Advantages: it's straight-up SIP (used to be IAX2), and has been working reliably for me for years. If I want to change SIP providers, I port my number and change a few lines in the Asterisk configuration file (but I've been happy with VoicePulse). And since I've got mostly incoming calls, I don't have to think about any usage costs there. Also, I can and do use standard SIP hardware phones over the internet as office phones, or use a software client -- I don't have to have it forward calls to another "real" phone with its own monthly charges.

Disadvantages: it is limited to 4 simultaneous calls (you can pay for more, though). This doesn't have any effect for my applications, but if you were trying to scale, I could see how it might. I don't get cool features like audio transcription. And I have to use Asterisk's less-than-straightforward logic for dialplans, etc.

At the end of the day, if I had to re-implement these two projects from scratch today, I would definitely consider Twilio for at least one of them. There may be an opportunity here for Twilio to capture recurring revenue from low intensity users: free inbound plus a larger monthly charge is a much more predictable bill for me, and to some degree I'm willing to pay more per month to be able to ignore incoming minute charges. That's a customer that consumes few resources but pays a non-trivial monthly subscription fee -- which is a customer I'd guess Twilio would like to have.

[1] http://www.voicepulse.com/connect/

Yes, $0.03/minute incoming and outgoing for local numbers, but $0.03/minute outgoing and $0.05/minute incoming for toll-free numbers.

I am moving away from voicepulse, in part because in the past six months I've paid $396 in DID fees, $20 in non-enumerated fees, $56 in non-enumerated adjustments, and $62.92 in usage.

The fact that we were unsatisfied with the ease of programming voice apps in Asterisk and FreeSwitch compared to Twilio also factored into the decision.

There's a little risk associated with dealing with a startup, but I'm willing to eat that. We don't have a vanity 1-800-#, so we can change the customer-facing numbers in a day if Twilio disappeared overnight.

If you want to write an app that you can move between multiple providers or run yourself (ie, it's legitimately portable), and/or want to choose your own SIP carrier, feel free to use Cloudvox [1].

Every app gets a SIP URI that any carrier's phone numbers can route to [2]. Our prices are much lower for third-party SIP calls, since we don't have telecom costs. It's free to sign up, as are local SIP phone calls (like between your SIP phones and your apps).

Apps use PHP-AGI, Adhearsion, Asterisk-Java, or any other Asterisk-compatible client library [3], or there's a HTTP/JSON interface [4].

We're fundamentally a cloud-scale Asterisk hosting service, like Heroku for phone/SMS services, so we aren't trying to get people to marry our API. If we don't do our jobs, take your app with you.

[1]: http://cloudvox.com/

[2]: http://help.cloudvox.com/faqs/getting-started/incoming-call-...

[3]: http://help.cloudvox.com/faqs/getting-started/agi-or-http

[4]: http://help.cloudvox.com/faqs/getting-started/http-api

Umm, just charge money for your product.

its google voice but for pay.. doesnt that defeat 90% of the purpose?

i use GV because its free and because it emails me voicemails.. and when i need to call overseas.. but when getting rid of the low/free cost most of the incentives are made irrelevant

I doubt that the point is to use it for in a personal context. Some will because they want to be able to customize exactly what's happening, but I suppose the main appeal would be for businesses.

I assume its targeted towards enterprise use, where Google Voice really fails, most notably by forbidding commercial use altogether.

Other advantages for businesses:

1) You can get a toll-free number

2) You could use it like a CRM (many employees sharing the number/responding to customers)

3) Could integrate it with your calendaring to direct calls to whoever is on call.

Obviously you could do all of this will Twilio already, but they've done a lot of the busywork for you. It looks like you could install this and be using at your company it today.

Regarding pricing, 'free' is not such a big deal in the enterprise market. In fact, I'd much rather pay my vendors so I know they'll stay in business. I suspect other companies feel the same way.

hi madmaze,

Yes, GV is great for consumers, but we built OpenVBX for businesses, and it's hackable so you can customize it fully. Check it out, would love feedback!

FYI: OpenVBX does transcriptions, emails, text messages and has competitive overseas prices :)

-jeff twilio.com

Thanks for the extra info, i guess i didnt consider the enterprise/business side of this, i mainly checked out the twilo page and didnt spend much time on the openvbx.

After i made the previous post i checked it out a little more and ill give it a try and give some feed back.

anyone know when we'll be allowed to transfer our cell phone numbers (from ATT/verizon/tmobile etc..) to skype/google voice/twilio?

I transfered my Vonage number to Twilio, it is awesome. http://barnabas.tumblr.com/post/652187572/vonage-twilio

What was the transfer process like?

It's pretty straightforward. You tell us (I work at Twilio) which numbers you want to port, send us some documentation proving you own them (a copy of your bill and a letter of authorization), we do the rest and get back to you when the port will be complete. It takes about 7-10 business days.

I don't know about Skype or GV, but since I work at Twilio I can answer that for us. You can already port your numbers to Twilio. After creating and upgrading your account, you'll see a port a number option in the dashboard. It takes 7-10 business days.

I should clarify that we can port Google Voice and Skype numbers to Twilio. I meant that I don't know if GV lets you port numbers in yet or not.

I wish one of these companies would solve the problem of using these services on your home phone. I have service from Time Warner, but can't forward to Google Voice or Twilio because TW doesn't offer conditional call forwarding. So instead of forwarding to the third-party voice mail after 4 or so rings, I only forward after a half a ring, making the service useless. I imagine TW doesn't provide conditional call forwarding because they also offer a voice mail service, albeit much less feature-full and $4/month.

Their vision of how you would use their service is to to use their number as your main number, and forward to your home phone.

That'd be fine, provided I could port my existing number to their service, get a replacement number from my provider, and then buy a handset that would make calls from my number appear as though they come from the ported number (as you can with Android and Google Voice).

I guess a device that could forward a phone call after a number of rings would do it, but I don't think one exists for PSTN.

Are there any plans for supporting UK customers?

I'd be on this in a flash.

You can use Twilio in the UK :) you just have to a) sign up properly (with a card) and b) email them to request international calling.

IIRC (I only use them for SMS) International Outbound rates to the UK are the same as US domestic rates :)

edit: yup, http://www.twilio.com/international-calling-rates

> IIRC (I only use them for SMS) International Outbound rates to the UK are the same as US domestic rates :)

It seems only for landlines, however. I'm always amazed by the obscene rates to call a mobile phone outside of the US. (This isn't exclusive to Twilio and I'm not blaming them)

Is the Twilio cost of $0.03 per minute in addition to the per minute costs of your phone line? Why isn't SIP or IAX access allowed? It seems very expensive and restricted.

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