Then you'll pay for all the phone calls from marketers. Thanks but no thanks
Totally understand the concern there, especially since you're already paying for your cellphone.
I did something similar a couple years ago when we were shopping for a car. A lot of car shopping sites are basically lead generators for dealerships and you need to provide a number to get real info. I used a Twilio number forwarded to my cellphone.
The deluge of calls started immediately. After 48 hours, when we had all the information we needed, I released the Twilio number and incurred no further charges.
Total cost was $1 (per month) for the phone number and $0.01 per minute for the inbound calls. Upside was that my phone stopped ringing the moment I was done talking to salesmen.
Or is your comment about sales versus engineers?
If their salespeople know how to fire up a little endpoint in kotlin using their API that's fantastic.
At some point a few years back, my VW dealership sold my phone number to people for vehicle service contracts. Even though I sold that car 4 years ago, I STILL get at least 2-3 calls per week from different companies offering to sell me an extended warranty. How does Twilio mitigate that for us?
(Off topic, but seriously, thanks for Twilio. Ping me if you want to know how we're using it in our new startup [email in profile]. It's pretty rad.)
Just wrote a lengthy reply to this concern up above, but the tl;dr is that we sit on all numbers for at least 2 months and wait until there's an acceptably low amount of inbound traffic before releasing them back into the available number pool.
Would love to hear how you're using us. Will drop you an email. (And thank you!)
From other VoIP providers, you can get that pretty easily. I use voip.ms and they charge $4.25/mo for a number and unlimited incoming.
If you only want a number for a month, thats $1.
Leaving $3.25 worth of calls at $0.05 (0.01 incoming, 0.04 back out to your cell) a minute forwarded to a mobile to match. Over an hour of calls, which I wouldn't hit on a gumtree advert.
That $4.25 presumably doesn't include the outbound leg, does it?
Twilio also do SIP registration, so you can route calls to your handset via SIP even more cheaply. (0.004 for outbound, so 0.01 and 0.004, for over 3.5 hours for that $3.25.
There are definitely usage cases for unlimited, but I don't think this is necessarily one of them unless you have a ridiculously high call volume. At that stage, I'd just use the voicemail to email Twimlet and bounce everyone into that.
Twilio - 0.0125 in 0.017 out
voip.ms - 0.09 in 0.005 out
Of course, the unlimited plan is only useful for a select few - if you want to plug it into your PBX and use it as a small support line (could be this case) or if you're making nightly calls for a few hours to relatives or a significant other, it's quite possibly worth it.
Depends what you're going to use it for and if you want that Twilio API really. If you just want a SIP number, it's pretty clear, but if you want all those nice API features and don't need super high volume, Twilio is probably the way to go.
Although there's something to be said for Twilio for straight up SIP too if you've got awkward fucking hardware. The Gigaset N300 is great, but the dialplan options are embarrassingly limited.
Twilio offer their own hosted Node.js (Twilio Functions - BETA) and TwiML Bins (free super-basic TwiML hosting with basic moustache templates for simple variable insertion.)
Pretty sure the whole project in the OP could have been done quicker and easier using Twilio Functions, but I get that it's more of a learning tutorial and example.
I use a combination of TwiML Bins, Functions and Twimlets to quickly chain together powerful functionality. And to work around the N300 dialplan limitations!
Edit: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/230878368-How-t...
https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/115007737928-Bu...