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Comment by aymeric | Hacker News Reader

I wish Twilio was available in the rest of the world though...

Appears like they do have Voice (and closed SMS beta).

What I don't understand is why it costs 2x-4x more than a regular phone contract gives you.

One day America's companies will discover that outside its borders there are, literally, billions of people.. imagine that.

To support just ONE country requires one set of lawyers. Supporting the second country DOUBLES the number of lawyers required, while adding only a fraction the number of customers. Once you scale it up "most of the world" the economies of scale kick in and the lawyers aren't so expensive anymore.

Of course, "lawyers" here is shorthand for several things. Complying with local law, handling local language, dealing with local customs, etc. "Lawyers" is a convenient shorthand because it points out that some of the things actually MUST be dealt with. Google doesn't prohibit the use of their payment system because they dislike having customers outside the current limited list of countries, they do so because they aren't smart enough to figure out how to handle every country!

We hear you, not only are there billions of people - there are literally MILLIONS of software developers globally, and we can't wait to serve them at Twilio. International support is one of our top requests and we're listening and working to bring Twilio to more customers every day.

Here's what we've currently got - Ability to dial out from Twilio US and Canadian numbers to International destinations - UK phone numbers w/ voice API in beta - International SMS in beta

For either one, just email help@twilio.com

Our full international FAQ is here: http://www.twilio.com/faq/international

Take a look at Tropo — in my opinion it's better than Twilio, not least because scripts can be written in Ruby and hosted on Tropo, and has (or had) much better international support.

I do like that they don't charge dev rates, but it does cost 3x as much in production.

And twilio works great with ruby, callinwith.us is a rails app.

Although if I needed international support I guess that would be an issue. Being a naive American has some perks though.

We've got great coverage for voice in countries all over the world: http://www.twilio.com/pricing/international-calling-rates You can both call to those countries and receive calls from them. We also just recently added local numbers in the UK in beta (http://www.twilio.com/uk-voice), which is just touching on the surface of what will be coming outside the US.

You've got my email now so we can get international calling enabled for your account if you'd like. Just reply in our other thread and let me know.

Sorry but a year after I chose Tropo over Twilio, Tropo still wins:

Twilio: "Twilio does not offer phone numbers from outside the US and Canada, and you can’t port international numbers to Twilio." http://www.twilio.com/faq/international

Tropo: "We offer local numbers in the US and 40 other countries - here's the full list of available countries, note that these are also free for developer accounts" https://www.tropo.com/docs/scripting/international_dialing_s...

That's my issue with Twilio too, I need UK inbound not just outbound - calling US numbers from the UK is (apart from with VoIP phones) pretty expensive.

Get UK inbound voice numbers here http://www.twilio.com/uk-voice Current wait time is ~1-3 business days for getting into the beta.

You missed that point: with Tropo you don't need "an app", you can do it all as a Ruby/js/java/etc script hosted by Tropo. It's obviously limited in scope but very useful for small apps

And keep in mind that the interface for Tropo and Adhearsion are very similar so if you need to expand beyond using Twillio or Tropo it gives you a lot of options with less pain...you can also use Adhearsion with Tropo as you are transitioning an app.

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