I wish Twilio had free offerings for their other services. I didnt even dare playing around testing Twilio because I would be getting charged 2 cents per SMS sent
We've got a trial account that will let you play around before spending any money. You'll only be able to text numbers that you've verified with us, but it should give you a feel for things (this is what the vast majority of students at Hackathons use).
If you want to give it a try: twilio.com/try-twilio
When you're ready to make the leap, $20 buys you about 2500 text messages in the US.
(disclaimer: work on Developer Community team)
If every engineer with a six-figure salary decided they would pay the couple bucks it costs to test drive a product, the customer long-tail for dev products would add up to something appreciable and as a result you might actually see a lot more innovation around dev tools. As it stands, one of the best developer products of our generation, Heroku, even had a hard time pricing / selling to their long tail and we saw shutdowns of great products like Parse.
Twilio actually has a very reasonable model. $20 deposit, non-recurring, is way less than you'd spend on a Thursday night date, for example, and you get to build something with it. Hell, speaking of building, you've probably spent more on a Lego set. (I have. As an adult... for myself.)
(What actually ends up happening is developer companies go full OSS, give everything away for free for massive adoption, then AWS figures out how to productize it and sell to Enterprise. You can trace the points from Docker's inception to AWS Lambda processing trillions of trades per day.)
This is an amazing move on their part. I think this lowers the barrier to use their services and it was already stupid simple to set up.
Well done!
Since you have no need for their service, not having your account on their system is best for Twilio.