Twilio SMS price halved to a penny per message | Hacker News Reader

Twilio SMS price halved to a penny per message

twilio.com

68 pointsjonknee31 comments

First of all, I love Twilio, have used it in production apps, and will continue to use it in production apps.

Just want to give a heads up about a very big limitation of Twilio SMS: It only delivers to US and Canadian phone numbers (http://www.twilio.com/faq/international). If you are building an app with any sort of international user base, you will need to look elsewhere. Clickatell has an API, delivers to almost every country, but their interface, billing, and customer support are painfully terrible. (http://www.clickatell.com/products/gateway.php).

So Twilio, do you plan to introduce International SMS support?

We currently have it in beta. You can sign up for access here: http://www.twilio.com/international-sms (Note that page says 2c/msg, but it is 1c/msg in the beta as well)

It's sad that you alienize your current userbase. Without notice, you guys broke many applications outside the US.

I was a client, the service was good. I stopped using it and came back two months ago, I bought additional credits, set up my app.. and it didn't work. This is the second time I apply for the beta, but I think that since I will be sending not so many SMS per month, you guys simply don't give a damn.

I'm not angry, but I didn't receive a notification, I spent $20 bucks and I haven't been able to use them. And I don't get a message telling me, at least, that I got rejected to the beta.

At least be honest with us, should we (low-volume sending customers) look for another service?

For the previous international SMS service (which was also in beta, though admittedly, not very clearly denoted as such) we notified those that we believed would be impacted by the change. I'm sorry that you did not receive a notification. That should not have happened that way.

Every customer, regardless of volume, is important to us. We're opening up the intl SMS beta to more and more customers every day. I'm happy to try to work something out with you. If we can't get you up and running, I'll refund your $20. Email me: jsheehan@twilio.com

Don't get me wrong. It's not about the money. It's about transparency. Maybe you didn't notify me because my account was inactive, but you had the data -- maybe I'd return one day and tried to use the app as usual, just to receive an error that the international service isn't active.

I'm contacting you right now. I haven't really looked up for another service because I've been quite comfortable with you. I'm happy this is really the exception in a very good experience.

How about ported numbers, do you support it? I pay 8c/SMS on Clickatell but their service is very reliable for intl and ported numbers.

You can port numbers to and from us for free and if they are US local numbers, you can use them for SMS. More info: http://www.twilio.com/faq/porting

Awesome - Thanks for the reply. I know international SMS is a pain in the ass, so thank you for trying to make it easier to implement and cheaper to use!

I love HN: you can ask companies questions, they answer.

I wish I had read the FAQs properly, didn't realise you couldn't send international! I signed up for your beta though, I want to do SMS messaging from the app but I have always found other services so expensive, I used to use Esendex in the UK but the plans drain cash so quickly.

I just wanted to send despatch confirmations through an ecommerce application. If you could do it for 3-4p GBP that would still be very cheap.

Signed up and ready to go on the beta though

Their current international pricing matches domestic, so you'd be paying about .6p GBP. Cheap cheap.

I'm using Clickatell and they charge about 8c/msg. Does the beta include delivery to Norway? If so, how can you charge 1c? Is Clickatell (and others) overcharging that much, or are you using alternative less stable methods of delivery?

you used to have in in Beta before as well - and then you suddenly, without telling developers beforehand, just killed it. Why should it be any different this time?

I moved to tropo.com and have been much happier

I never read about it here on hn but I used Cardboardfish.com in a couple of projects. The API is similar to the Clickatell's (they are all pretty the same) but I found most of routes to be cheaper.

Exactly 30 days after competitor Tropo lowered their SMS prices to a penny per message: http://blog.tropo.com/2011/05/11/announcing-new-lower-sms-pr...

The joys of competition :-)

Just to avoid any confusion for Twilio customers on this thread, we lowered SMS pricing to $0.01/message on the evening of May 20th (yes, Tropo went first), so that is what you'll see reflected in your Twilio account. The reason there is so much buzz today is because we just announced the change today in our newsletter/blog, along with the release of the new "Apps" feature in the developer dashboard.

We're proud to keep reducing prices for SMS, first from the original $0.03 down to $0.02 back in September, and now this price cut. It's our customers and their business that make this possible, through better economies of scale that allow us to reduce SMS cost for developers while still making it financially viable for us as a business. Affordable SMS is opening up incredible use cases.

This is incredible. The lowest price advertised by Clickatell is $0.012/msg, and that price can only be reached by paying for 500,000 messages or more - that is, paying $6000 or more.

This has to be welcome news for GroupMe and other Twilio SMS heavy startups.

I hate to be downbeat but I am using Twilio for my next service and I would prefer to have Twilio stay in business for the next 10 years then to lower prices to a cut rate amount.

We'd prefer to stay in business too! We're growing and as we get bigger we get better rates that we can pass on to you and the numbers still work. So you can have both: lower prices and we'll still be around in 10 years (and hopefully the next 50 years after that).

It is fascinating to see the market develop so fast. I have created http://www.longnumbers.com as an industry portal. I need feedback. Please tell me what y'all think.

Any hope of reducing the outbound calls to 1c/min as well?

It's cheaper for me to use http://flowroute.com/ + Asterisk directly than twilio.

We've had 3 price drops on our services in the past year, so while I don't have anything I can promise you for outbound calls, we're committed to giving you the best price we are able to provide.

Does anyone know an European service that is as great as Twilio? All provider here in Germany suck more or less, offer a bad API and are totally overpriced.

Check Tropo.com. It accepts customers from outside the US and international SMS's are 2 cents a piece. Not all operators are supported, though. E.g. there is one operator in Belgium Tropo doesn't send to. Your mileage may vary (Germany will probably be better covered).

Nice, now only $65 per megabyte. You could txt someone an entire Blu-Ray disk for only $3.3 million!

Yes, the prices carriers set are ridiculous. But we all still use and love SMS for some reason.

That would be a legitimate issue if SMS were used to transfer files... A penny to [push] contact anyone with a mobile phone is a pretty good deal all things considered. It definitely beats email which while cheaper has the problem of spammers that make actually sending email in bulk a nightmare.

IDK if they are aimed at the same market, but HeyWire messages are free.

HeyWire doesn't seem to offer an SMS API. If they did that for free, I'm sure they would be out of business in no time flat.

Completely separate market. Twilio is targeted at business applications--sending and receiving SMS via an API. It's not meant so you can text your friend, it's meant so you can enable SMS in your app. The pricing has fallen quite a bit, it was 3 cents per message when SMS functionality was introduced in Feb 2010.

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