Twilio Raises $17 Million Series C To Expand Abroad
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)
How can this be that difficult to do?
For SMS-only apps that don't use voice or speech recognition, we also have http://SMSified.com which is a RESTful API based on the GSMA standard for SMS - launching in international beta soon (U.S only ATM).
International SMS is tricky (as most will agree) but we do have many devs and customers using our Tropo Canadian SMS service without performance issues. One of the reasons we don't charge developers to test on Tropo is because we know it takes time (and lots of testing) to make an app that your customers will be able to trust and rely upon. Feel free to email me at diggz at tropo dot com.
Simple test: send more than 1 message from a phone number in the span of 15 seconds during a bulk test. At random Tropo will drop the second message because the first one hasn't gone through yet on your system. No error message, nothing, it just drops the data. I know why it does this, I've read the docs, but that's a crazy "feature"! why can't you queue it like Twilio does? that's just one example. Don't even get me started on your logging system. There's no sane way to get reports! none!
We looked at SMSified and even tried to use their Canadian numbers (somehow we got a few Canadian SMS enabled numbers even though we were told it's not supported.) That thing was basically unusable. Delivery rates of around 60%, with totally random inexplicable failures.
Twilio on the other hand has been awesome. No weirdness, very reasonable defaults, rock solid performance, good logs. Just very pleasant to use in general.
You are correct that Tropo does not have built-in queueing today and I also agree that it should at least let you know if it can't deliver a message.
Better reporting is also at the top of our list for the next rev.
Again, thanks for taking the time to give me your feedback. I think you'll be pleased to see these suggestions baked into the next version of Tropo. +) Diggz
Any ETA on those changes?
I'm not sure what the hold up is either, I have an app in Twilio that's being held back by the Polite Canadians needing SMS and I can't get mad at them, and am having to consider moving everything to Tropo or something else... Tropo reviews thus far here don't seem encouraging.
Their move to the UK was very half-assed, still no SMS support for the UK... :( I hope they fix that with this new funding before they expand elsewhere.
The current pricing is too expensive. Thanks for free $10 for trial though.
I'm not sure if anyone from Twilio can comment but maybe someone with some relevant experience can.
I've perused the site and understand the functionality but don't see where such high demand is coming from. A few people are commenting here that they use it to send SMS, which makes sense, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing large use cases besides text/call user for confirmation of some action or sending a large alert to many users.
My mental summary keeps coming back to "push notifications without an app installed and to any phone". (I'm not implying that's insignificant.) Is that off base?
If you use Rails, try out @stevegraham's twilio-rb gem.
Twilio makes telecom IVR as simple as writing a web application, and they're very affordable with no up-front costs.
I've written custom emergency notification systems, call-in contests, intelligent call forwarding systems (you could replicate Google Voice). Any phone app you can think of can be constructed.
We started using them for SMS sending but went with Nexmo at a fraction of the cost.
I went to both Twiliocon and interviewed with Twilio. They're very smart guys, but the problem is that its a race to the bottom. Their idea is innovative (webapps <-> telco integration), but anyone can do it once they learn how to handle the SMS messages between the web and the carrier gateways, as well as how to handle call flows with Asterisk or Freeswitch.
Also, to me, it appears they're swimming upstream. Everyone else is moving towards unlimited voice/sms, while they're trying to stick to per minute/per sms rates (even for their VoIP offering!).
Awesome idea, excellent execution, not a long term business model.
I just hope they take some of that investment and bring basic voice recognition to their product, and perhaps some more TTS voices (some Loquendo voices would be grand!).