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Comment by fyfy18 | Hacker News Reader

At a first glance the pricing of $0.10 - $0.025 per megabyte in Europe seems somewhat expensive. The wholesale rate is €4.50 per gigabyte or $0.005c per megabyte. I assume the markup covers the cost of maintaining the account and the access to many networks worldwide. Can anyone who is already using GSM data in "IoT" devices comment on how much this compares to what you pay now?

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€4.50/GB is absolutely insane for Europe. In Italy you can get 50GB for €7 From Kena or ho.mobile (€0.14/GB) or 50GB for €8 from Illiad (€0.16/GB). All at 4G speeds.

https://www.kenamobile.it/prodotto/kena-6-99-limited-edition...

https://www.ho-mobile.it/

https://www.iliad.it/offerta-iliad.html

Wholesale rate is for businesses where they pay for the actual usage, and consumer-oriented providers, which you mentioned, oversell network capacity.

There's overselling and then there's assuming that the average user is only going to use 3% of their allowance! That seems pretty optimistic. Having said that presumably the wholesale rate varies quite a bit between countries, and I assume some contracts are offered as loss leaders.

The point about the overselling / oversubscribing for consumer rates actually goes counter to your point since every customer (consumer or business) all have the same priority in European networks.

One of my relatives in Italy is using Kena. It's solid. Even though they advertise 30 Mbps, we clocked it at 68 once. Generally it's more than enough to watch Youtube, which is where most bandwidth is spent, unless you hotspot to a laptop.

Depends on the country, no? In Spain you get like 1 to 3 GB (depending on the operator) for 7€. And that's with very cheap operators with poor support.

€4.50/GB is the maximum what EU operators are allowed to charge each other for roaming data transit right now, and what an external operator like Twilio would probably have to pay them. Of course in each country you will find operators who offer better deals on their own networks - but Twilio can't reasonably build out their own worldwide mobile network.

Despite this, I can see this service being popular among companies who are willing to pay a bit more per GB to avoid negotiating with operators and getting SIM cards all over the world.

As long as we're discussing pricing, let me plead for an option with $0 monthly fee, even if the data itself is expensive. I have a couple products in mind where mobile data would be a necessary backup, and spending $2/month/device for that won't work for the market I have in mind.

The value Twilio's offering is when you need coverage also outside Europe, in remote countries. Yes, you can get cheaper data plans to cover the EU, but those often come with very high data rates in other areas.

I get $10/GB on Google Fi and can have 9 data only sim cards on my plan for $20/month.

I don't think you can really compare the prices of this kind of low-data, many-sim offer with consumer stuff.

Recently I talked to a national (Portugal) operator who offers M2M SIM cards and their price for national only cards is 0,19€/MB, international one similar to this 0,27€/MB.

Twilio's price is pretty good compared to what they've got.

This looks pretty expensive compared to prices in South East Asia too. You pay between $10 - $30 for a prepared SIM with 10-15 gigs which comes down to $0.001 - $0.003 per megabyte.

With the plans you mentioned, how much do you pay per month if you use only 1 MB?

I see your point

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