Twilio Is Crushing It: 150K Devs, 1.5M Phone Calls/Day, 500M Total Phone Calls | Hacker News Reader

Twilio Is Crushing It: 150K Devs, 1.5M Phone Calls/Day, 500M Total Phone Calls

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50 pointsplayhard45 comments

So, I'm going to be that guy.

Twilio makes its money on SMS and voice services. Those services are cheap and very easy to develop with using Twilio.

Note though that most cellular carriers are moving towards data plans instead of voice packages (Verizon especially) because most people use their phones/mobile devices for data consumption, and less as phones. So while I think Twilio provides fabulous value now, I feel like they're at the tail end of the telephone-based telecommunications revolution. As people move more away from POTS calls (and more towards Skype, Google Chat, iMessages, etc), the need for phone calls and SMS messages will drop quite a bit, as they'll all be handled over other services.

TL;DR Twilio has a shelf life. It'd be like developing services around a shrinking but still necessary industry (like the postal service).

Disclaimer: I love Twilio. I went to last year's TwilioCon and have met management.

As people move to these other APIs there will still be a need to script things surely.

Providing a single clean API that can do everything would be a fine "pivot".

Besides I think it's going to be a shockingly long time before we get rid of POTS altogether.

Voice communication is not going away any time soon. Twilio Client lets them continue powering it for developers well into the future. (disclaimer: used to work there)

POTS is not going away anytime soon. Yes, it is seeing evolution happen (circa: VOIP) but at the end of the day, POTS is a critical infrastructure to almost every developed and developing country.

I love Twilio, but every time I get a robocall to my cell phone selling me cheap insurance, I cringe a little, and wonder if Twilio is enabling this. I wish Twilio had a "is this a Twilio phone number" lookup so that I can report such activity.

I'm constantly amazed that we don't have "report as spam" for calls and sms yet.

Apple could provide this quite easily, and it would be a huge differentiator.

We do; it's called Google Voice.

Unfortunately it's not available in most places.

and they won't let you block "unknown" numbers.

Frankly I am stunned that carriers even let those through in the first place. Has there ever been a person in the history of telephony who wouldn't prefer it if they could never receive calls from unknown numbers?

Then I remember that call centers probably rack up huge phone bills...

Many countries ban phone spam or have a centralised opt out list. A good side of the regulated telecom world.

edit: replying to comment below, many countries have working opt out lists.

The centralized opt out list does not work. We have a centralized "Do Not Disturb" (DND) list in India and it does not work. The marketers always figure out loopholes in the system.

Not with the ban system. Here in France, you can report companies that make automated phone calls and they get strongly punished. I haven't received one in years.

Of course, sometimes I get calls from actual humans for polls or advertising a product, but it's much less of a bother since it happens less often and you can reject them.

I want to know why unknown number, regardless of actual origin (spam or otherwise) is even permitted to go through PBXes or the like. Why isn't everything in the network, including my phone, set to drop "unknown number" calls right on the floor?

My phone should be saying to itself "Hold on a second, am I about to turn on the buzzer and display the text "Unknown caller" to the users? /dev/null it."

Privacy/anonymity is a basic feature of any useful personal communication mechanism as I hope you know. Snailmail supported it before the phone network, and the internet supported it after the phone network. Though maybe people have forgotten now that they've moved en masse to things like facebook (<rant elided>...)

Maybe people don't know how to select this feature when they make calls? At least in GSM based networks you can select it on a per call basis when dialing (#31# prefix).

Eg. calling in anonymous tips to your local newspaper, communicating with an annoying company you don't want calling back, etc.

90% of my unknown calls are people Skyping me. I have no desire to block them.

There is for SMS: forward the spam SMS to the number SPAM/7726.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_spam#Countermeasur...

Works with AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-mobile according to Wikipedia.

We do in the UK, just forward the spam text message to 7726 (87726 for vodafone). That reports it to your carrier who then reports it to the ICO.

No-one knows about it of course, a recent survey found just 3% of people knew it existed or that the ICO were the right people to report these spam messages to.

This is the first I've heard of this! I get daily spam texts from PPI companies (I even know what company they're coming from) so this will be invaluable to me. Thanks for posting!

If you are getting truly unsolicited calls or messages you can email Twilio and ask them to check it out. However, having worked there and looking up numbers I was getting contacted by, I never had a positive match in Twilio's inventory.

I understand these calls could be coming from anywhere, and Twilio isn't the only game in town. Since I am familiar with Twilio, and I know how easy it would be to put up a robo caller, I can't help but suspect. Its what I would use to do it. A self-service search tool would be neat, or maybe a tool to see if any Twilio services have called your number recently. Despite the annoying calls, I don't want to bother Twilio staff with inquiries.

Do you cringe and blame your ISP every time you receive an email spam?

Please don't equate email spam to phone call spam. A phone call often requires immediate attention to filter out. Its an interrupt-based process. Email is a different animal.

What exactly are they crushing? Is something here being physically compacted?

If not, can we crush the use of "crushing it?" It's 2012. "Crushing it" isn't any better now than "killing it" was in 2011.

Quick. To the code dojo, to crush down and hustle some new paradigms ninja-style before things blow up!

It's a metaphor. Quit raining on my startup troll parade.

What's it a metaphor for?

Crushing things?

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crushing%20it

I suspect that 'crushing it' first referred to standard usage of the male sexual organ and later was extended to other usages.

Crushing the obstacles in your path?

Being not from the West Coast of the USA or not in my early 20s or for some other reason I really had no idea whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to be 'crushing it'.

In which social group is this a commonly understood phrase and could you advise me on whether I should start dropping it into conversation to impress my peers.

I'm glad to see such tremendous growth for such a tremendous service. Twilio enabled us to get our VoIP functionality up and running quickly and we're certainly grateful for it.

Has anyone with telephony industry experience written up a pros and cons and comparison chart between twilio, tropo, telapi, plivo, etc?

Ugh, what is it with this offputting language - their doing well, this isn't some 80s frathouse movie.

This is almost as cringy as that picture of a young bill gates in a 'sexy' pose.

Who are Twilio's competition? I know of textmarks, which serves a lot of sms traffic, but there doesn't seem to be much else competing in this space.

Plivo. Really the only one. And they're awesome from what I've seen of them. Volume pricing from the start too.

Twilio does volume pricing from the start as well:

http://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing#volume-pricing

Twilio's volume pricing for inbound calls only kicks in after 500K minutes. You get that rate with Plivo for your first minute. Twilio's per-minute volume pricing for over 15M minutes of outbound per month is still more expensive than what you pay Plivo starting with your first outbound call. That's what volume pricing from the start means.

telapi, 2600hz, tropo to name a few (Plivo was mentioned as well)

There are a lot of competition I think. I mean smaller VoIP companies such as VoIPSwitch or Mizutech http://www.mizu-voip.com

For cloud hosted API driven voice, plivo.

For voice in general, thousands of random VoIP/etc providers, mainly built on actual standards like SIP and H323, linked to on premises or collocated servers.

This space is pretty big and it is often hard to understand the actual difference between the players.

We here over at 46elks are proud of our API focused on the mobile side of things. If you are in Europe and need numbers for SMS, MMS or phone calls (not just voice-only), we'd be happy to help you. You can find us at http://www.46elks.com/

I'm a member of the TextMarks team, for what it's worth. My perspective, like many participants in this discussion, is that the SMS space is very crowded. That said, if you're looking for a good API--which is what Twilio is all about--- the competition is actually pretty small. Plivo is good. Trumpia and Eztexting are okay too, but probably aren't as stable, fast, and well supported as TextMarks, Twilio and Plivo. That's kind of the bottom line, in my view. Best of luck with your project.

awesome. i know one of the founders, when he told me what he was doing after grad school i was surprised there's any money in it. shows you what i know!

super proud of that team, really great story all around.

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