Free Plivo Developer Accounts for Life | Hacker News Reader

Free Plivo Developer Accounts for Life

blog.plivo.com

37 pointsbevenky28 comments

I hate it when a company weblog doesn't have a prominent link to the home site. Sure, I can edit the URL bar, but it's good to make things more convenient to the user.

http://www.plivo.com/

UPDATE: As noted in the next comment, it's been fixed. Thanks!

Why can't a developer buy a plivo number? I would have been nice to have that as well.

Well, Phone numbers have a carrier cost. Hence we have tried to make this win-win. We give you the credits which allows you to build most of the needed apps on the cloud.

For the Phone numbers, You can still bring your own phone numbers from free services like ipkall.com and virtualphoneline.com

There are a bunch of more services like these if you google around. :)

Plivo will work with any of these around the globe.

How does Google give out Google Voice phone numbers for free? Are they accepting a loss every time someone registers a new number?

yes, they're losing money on each one

The number itself probably isn't costing them much compared to the per-minute costs of outgoing calls. In the US, once you become a CLEC (basically a non-incumbent telco - Google isn't a CLEC but they buy from them) you can get blocks of phone numbers assigned to you and pay no recurring per-number costs. In fact, you can even charge the caller a small interconnection fee and make a tiny amount of money per call (so tiny that the caller's telco generally eats the cost). This is how services like IPKall and Callcentric (both are CLECs) can offer free phone numbers, and why I suspect Google pays very little per phone number. The equipment you need to be a CLEC is quite expensive though so consequentially IPKall and Callcentric only offer free numbers in a few area codes.

Thanks for this comment. Where can one get blocks of fax numbers. You mentioned CLEC's get block of phone numbers, is there a similar system for allocating blocks of fax numbers. For instance HelloFax usually assign Fax numbers to customers based on area code. Where do they get the fax numbers from?

Many thanks.

Same way - fax numbers are no different from regular phone numbers in the PSTN. (That said, once VoIP enters the equation, you want to use a fax-friendly codec like T.38.) HelloFax is surely not their own CLEC so they're buying phone numbers (with a monthly cost) from one or more CLECs or CLEC resellers. If you know a HelloFax phone number you can look up who the CLEC is using this form:

http://www.alcazarnetworks.com/data_services_lnp_lrn.php

Thanks for the info :)

@agwa, many thanks for the response.

it's misleading to offer this free credit but have such a huge exclusion on what you can do with it.. Twilio used to have a $20 credit for all new accounts without restrictions, but now that the product matured, it's no more. if you expect people to start building things on your platform and show them off, give them real credit without the *fine print.

You can still use all our apis and xml and build your apps. Like I mentioned earlier, you can still use any of the free DID services and those will work with us.

Except you can't call out or use SMS - there aren't any free services that provide those - which constrains the apps you can build. I have to agree that this announcement is a little underwhelming especially compared to what Twilio used to offer.

Plivo Endpoints works just as great as real numbers. So, you can just build your app using endpoints and use real numbers when you are good to go.

One of the largest benefits for us was the ability to rent numbers through the API. Since developer accounts can't rent real numbers will you be renting out some sort of internal numbers? Not allowing any numbers to be rented seems like an oversight since I'd imagine a lot of apps use (and want to test) this type of functionality.

What if I've previously signed up for an account? Is there a way to ‘convert’ my account to a developer account and leverage this new offering?

Sure. Shoot us your username over our live chat and we will get this done :)

Disclaimer: I work at 2600hz, the open-source cloud telecom company.

I don't understand what the credit is for... Is it for SIP end points to SIP endpoint calls, or to help offset the plivo tariff on external carriers? If you can't use the money to buy DIDs or make calls or send SMS, what can you do with it?

Genuinely curious.

What can you actually use the credits for? You can't pay for incoming calls/sms or outgoing calls/sms. That leaves IP calls and transcription costs. Is that it? Or am I missing something.

And if I do bring my own phone number, what do I still pay for to Plivo?

The free developer account allows you to do more than just IP calls.

You can create Plivo endpoints to make calls on a multitude of clients -> Browsers (using our Web SDK), iOS, Android, any Soft phone that runs SIP, and any hardware phone that runs SIP like Polycom or Cisco.

When you bring in your own numbers, you will not be charged. Additionally, when you make calls on these numbers, the balance is taken from the credits on the free developer account.

I'm actually in the middle of evaluating Twilio and Tropo for a client. How does this compare?

Well, I am not the one to comment on them but if you are considering them you will want to consider Plivo as well…

Drop us a note at hello@plivo.com and we will help you with it!

We do international SMS and use smsglobal and tropo.

"Oops, Sorry there's been an error. We are digging into it." on signup :( Maybe the + I used in the email address?

The pricing is outrageous compared to Twilio. 8 cents per text message?

Not sure where you saw 8 cents. Its actually 0.8 cents and once you start scaling higher it gets cheaper.

http://plivo.com/pricing/

Whoops! Didn't see that :)

To be fair, I didn't see the pricing page at all. I did see the 0.8c on the Buy Number page. I suppose 0.8c is accurate, but you'd probably be better off putting $0.008 instead.

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