
Introducing Worldwide SMS Messaging - tellnes
https://mobile.awsblog.com/post/TxSP0HUNM8FQ1Y/Introducing-Worldwide-SMS-Messaging
======
jakozaur
Marginally cheaper than Twilio for USA: $0.00645 vs. $0.0075

Much more expensive in Europe (e.g. major networks in Poland Twilio $0.03467,
AWS $0.03897 - 0.07711)

[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing)

[http://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-
pricing/)

~~~
jonknee
Considering that Twilio hosts with AWS, that will be a tough price war for
Twilio to win.

~~~
dforrestwilson
Can we contrast the aggressive Amazon platform vs customer dynamic with other
cloud providers?

Why would a new company opt for Amazon at the risk of being copied and
competed with as we're seeing with Netflix, Twilio, and numerous Amazon store
vendors? Why not go with Google or Microsoft?

~~~
eldavido
Think like a customer.

Netflix has a lot of customers, IMO because they developed great
recommendation IP, they have a large content library, and have invested
heavily into customer acquisition and marketing to build a consumer brand.

Netflix will use AWS infrastructure if it benefits their business and go
elsewhere if it doesn't. The fact that the two companies compete in some ways
is pretty much irrelevant to Netflix's (operational) decision of hosting
provider.

------
cyberferret
Excellent news - I have been waiting for this for a while.

NOTE: Seems to be having issues sending SMSs to Australian mobile numbers -
I've been tweaking and sending on the dashboard for a while now and nothing is
coming through. Never mind - early days yet.

Am surprised at the cost differences between countries too - seems to be a lot
more expensive than other third part SMS services I am using at the moment.
(Comparatives - .009 cents for most US carriers, and 19 cents for most Aussie
carriers!)

~~~
rikthevik
What other SMS services are you using? Those prices are really good for the
US!

~~~
cyberferret
Oh, the US pricing is incredibly good. It is the overseas carriers that are a
problem (especially here in Australia). The international pricing is 2x to 4x
the price of some of the popular third party SMS service providers.

------
Animats
More like "Amazon AWS introduces worldwide SMS spamming". They changed their
service from opt-in to opt-out. Even after the recipient opts out, the spammer
can override and opt them back in against their will.[1] There's even an API
for doing that in bulk.

Amazon's service seems to be one-way. They don't seem to support SMS receive
at all. They just blast out crap from their own shortcodes.

[1]
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_manage.html](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_manage.html)

------
landfall
I like that we can choose between transactional and promotional messages in
order to optimize for high delivery success rate or cost savings.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
There is still a lot of dependency by the carriers to adhere to this which
most do not. They have no systems in place to differentiate. So while you may
think your message is transactional, it may still get blocked for spam because
the carriers aren't smart enough to know the difference.

------
intrasight
When I did programmatic SMS for a project ~10 years ago, I just used SMTP and
the email equivalent of the SMS address. I haven't done similar projects since
then, so I'm curious if there is some reason that approach would no longer
work.

~~~
headcanon
In addition to having to know the carrier, the text message itself sometimes
includes email-style metadata (like FROM, SUBJECT, MESSAGE, etc) that varies
by carrier, so its difficult to control the experience. Its one of those
things thats good for a personal project but not for a service that sends lots
of text messages to users.

I didn't know this until I just tried it, but doing it over email supports
replies (at least on AT&T), which is pretty cool.

~~~
intrasight
In the app I had built (for NBA) I think we just asked people for their
carrier name. Or we may have used a lookup service - I don't recall.

------
radarsat1
Does this mean I'm about to get a lot more spam directly to my phone?

~~~
sleepyhead
No, there are already plenty of other services to be used to send SMS to your
phone.

~~~
takeda
So adding yet one more with competitive pricing won't do anything?

I thought same thing as the parent when I started reading blog entry.
Especially the part where opt-in requirement was removed.

~~~
sleepyhead
No, lots of alternatives already. And given the more complex AWS Console and
documentation compared to alternatives I don't think it will make much
difference to whether someone who wants to start spamming your phone will
think "ah yes since I can now send SMS with AWS now is the time to start
spamming"

------
aviv
My guess is that there is already a team at Amazon working on a voice/webrtc
and SIP trunking AWS product for a 2017 launch.

------
arrty88
I wonder how this will affect newly IPOed twilio

~~~
taf2
Considering it does NOT look to support inbound or voice probably very little
impact. (edit) i some how always forget the most important NOT operators.

~~~
ziszis
Low impact in the short term, potentially huge impact in medium term (1-2
years). The pattern for other AWS services is that they will drive down price
until they are low price provider and quickly close feature gaps. Adding
inbound to SMS seems like a natural next step.

Also, SMS is a substantial part of Twilio's business. Even though Twilio has
been adding new extensions to their product, the majority of usage is tied to
a small set of API calls.

Twilio now has a company with a huge developer audience going straight after
their core business. One that is willing to be very aggressive on price to win
share.

~~~
eldavido
Yes -- this is why it seems risky to invest in Twilio long-term.

Sure, they have the developers today, but if WhatsApp leaves, and Amazon can
cross-sell more of their existing customers what they'd otherwise get from
Twilio, that's a big problem long-term. Twilio has a bit of a moat with their
carrier/provider relationships, but that won't hold up against Amazon's entry.

Time will tell, I guess. The stock has been going crazy the past few days,
though

------
yarapavan
India pricing is atleast twice the price of any decent SMS provider in the
country at 0.0045 USD per transactional SMS.

~~~
iamd3vil
Do you know any good SMS providers for India with a nice API? I am looking for
one and can't decide which one is good.

~~~
kauboy
We've been using SMS Gupshup and are pretty happy with their services.

------
rco8786
Interesting timing considering Twilio's IPO

------
nnx
Really nice to have precise SMS delivery reports automatically pushed to
Cloudwatch Logs. Makes it fit very nicely into the whole AWS offering (eg.
automatically trigger a Lambda function to act upon a failed delivery).

------
Artlav
Now, when would they make something like that that would go backwards? I want
to strap a GSM module to a balloon, let it fly around the world and SMS it's
position every so often.

------
lowglow
I wonder if AWS uses a startup/company's reliance/traffic on their service to
investigate what services to offer people. Using metrics for client
services/infrastructure running equates to demand and possible revenue
insights, (eg Twilio) could be used to dictate what to build next.

Sneaky, and would make me reconsider building on the platform if that were the
case.

[edit] Makes sense, since we've seen them use this same method for their
products and Amazon Basics™ line of products.

------
geekxx
Flowroute is $.004
[https://www.flowroute.com/sms/faq/](https://www.flowroute.com/sms/faq/)

------
MichaelBurge
This'll be nice to receive SMS alerts on deployment or monitoring failures
when using other AWS services. I don't think it compares to Twilio, since it
seems to be more for alerts than for your main application use; you could
cobble together something that creates a new SNS topic for each (user, phone
number), but I'd doubt my ability to keep so many topics organized.

------
matthewrudy
I'm surprised they offer messaging in China. Our China SMS provider
(yuntongxun.com) only allows templated SMS messages.

Eg. "Hello {{name}}"

------
skc
I'm surprised at the variability of pricing by different vendors in this
space. I would have imagined they would all be competing on breadth of API
rather than price.

An SMS to a number on a particular network provider should cost pretty much
the same for all Messaging Platform Providers originating from the same
countries.

------
mk89
..but why? How is this relevant to their business? I mean, I do understand
that AWS and Amazon (the e-commerce) don't have anything in common, but why to
focus on such a product that already exists (and that's even better)?

~~~
cwyers
It's an addition to SNS, which is AWS's notification service -- you set
alerts, and if a server goes down, or any other thing you set up a trigger
for, it messages you. It's just expanding to new markets.

------
hathym
it's curious that they announced the service after twilio IPO

------
sleepyhead
Just compared their pricing to Nexmo here in Norway. Almost double the price.
AWS: $0.09109. Nexmo: $0.0530.

~~~
Nazzareno
MailUp even lower: from $0.044 to $0.032
[http://www.mailup.com/pricing/sms/?cID=no](http://www.mailup.com/pricing/sms/?cID=no)

------
wildster
Why are UK SMSs so expensive?

------
namikaze
Great news! Amazon will get into any kind of service that is part of an
infrastructure. There are a one-stop shop of building blocks required to build
a web service. Their inventory is only going to get diverse and bigger.

