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Comment by forkLding | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Twilio is making a move into becoming the go-to Enterprise/B2C API platform, being already the biggest company in SMS and Voice message APIs, acquiring Sendgrid to gain advantage in Email APIs and then Segment to be able to manage customer data. Think they might go acquire some kind of customer/user analytics API next.

Realized this when I use Twilio SMS + Video, Sendgrid and Segment together before their acquisitions and now I'm just sort of using Twilio, Twilio Sendgrid and now Twilio Segment.

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It isnt a bad spot to be in. My only gripe against Twilio is its definitely priced for enterprise.

I wouldnt build a startup on Twilio its costs eventually add up much higher than competitors. "Just because someone spends a lot on marketing doesn’t mean you should be paying for their marketing budget, especially as the core product commoditizes."[0] On the other hand they definitely have a rich API and I suppose they have tremendous uptime to boot. I never had a single issue setting up Twilio or Sendgrid any issues I had were with a web framework or other libraries, or network firewall but never Twilios APIs specifically.

[0]: http://alanquayle.com/2018/02/sms-api-pricing/

Who do you use instead?

I have tried bandwidth.com before. They are cheaper and claim they own the VOIP infra so can afford to be.

https://www.bandwidth.com/twilio-alternative/

For a fun project though so can't comment on uptime etc. However, if they are powering the VOIP infra behind the other providers, should be good I guess?

what did you do about the minimum monthly requirement?

Got a free trial key. Didn't know they had a min requirement

It seems like the most successful SaaS companies eventually expand beyond their initial product category to become a platform with a wide range of services and a whole ecosystem around them. Some go really wide, like Salesforce, while others seem to try to keep some coherence around the core product (at least for now), e.g. Zendesk and Intercom. It seems Twillio wants to go quite wide too.

I wonder if Stripe and Twilio merging could ever make sense - that would make for quite the powerhouse.

Beyond the developer friendly aspect, I would think running a payment infra is very different business than running SMS/email/integrations? Former has lot of challenges around compliance, fraud etc too.

If Twilio wants to own the entire developer ecosystem, maybe they will do others like APM first (Datadogs etc)?

Not to say a merger makes sense, but telco-adjacent work like voice and SMS also has massive challenges around stamping out fraud and lots of regulatory frameworks to manage.

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