
Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO - whatami
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-23/twilio-s-dutch-rival-messagebird-plans-an-ipo-in-gold-rush
======
asciimo
I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from
Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and
desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to
Twilio. And got free tacos.

~~~
skrtskrt
Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision
makers who largely think Twilio is the only option.

Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good
developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a
defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still
compete terribly for service outside North America.

This is why they are building on top of the underlying commodity and moving
upmarket into things like call center automation products, which start to
compete directly with many of their customers.

You can easily negotiate down your SIP/SMS Twilio prices the second you
realize they have plenty of competitors.

If a smaller competitor gets their name out there by doing some basic
guerrilla marketing against a behemoth public company with tons of money, it
seems pretty benign. Everyone wins but the overpriced incumbent.

~~~
icedchai
SignalWire is also a Twilio competitor. Their SMS pricing is much, much
cheaper and they have cloned the Twilio APIs. I am not affiliated with them,
other than as a customer of both Twilio and SignalWire at different times
(small dev accounts.)

[https://signalwire.com/pricing/messaging](https://signalwire.com/pricing/messaging)

~~~
skrtskrt
Off top I know of

Messagebird, Plivo, Nexmo (part of Vonage), Telnyx, Voxbone, Signalwire

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perennate
Would consider using them but Taiwan is not a province of China
([https://messagebird.com/en/numbers/](https://messagebird.com/en/numbers/)).
If a company has has many factual errors on their website like this, then I
cannot trust their service to be reliable.

~~~
shell0x
Upvoted. Thanks for pointing that out. As someone who lived in Taiwan and has
friends there that's a big issue.

Taiwan has democracy, doesn't threaten its neighbours, has a working legal
system, respects human rights, and has an educated population with access to
the free world.

Calling it part of China is highly offensive and bowing down to the communist
propaganda is simply unacceptable. They have Huawei as a client so choose
money over morals.

~~~
robertvis
Its an honest mistake and we’ll correct it.

~~~
shell0x
Thanks, much appreciated!

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joelbluminator
It's good to see more Dutch (or European in general) software companies
succeed. I hope VC will be easier to come by in Europe, I think it's the main
set back European founders face.

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hardwaregeek
I misread that as Twitter's Dutch rival. MessageBird would be a hilarious name
for a Twitter competitor.

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thijsvandien
I've been a happy customer for years. Their services work well. Unfortunately,
the same cannot be said (anymore) about their dashboard. Slow, unreliable,
buggy... I got really close to trying Twilio this time. It concerns me when
companies want to grow faster when it seems they are having problems with
having grown too fast already.

~~~
dsincl12
I've had the exact opposite experience.

I don't know how many 200 OK I've received but the message was never delivered
(and soooo many times during vital demos). I had several support cases with
them and they simply ignored me. My product is built around SMS so I could
have been easy money for them if it actually worked reliably.

I ditched them for Twilio, never had any issues since then. A couple of months
later someone from sales at MessageBird reached out to me on LinkedIn and
asked if I wanted to try their service. Spilled my guts to him and he wasn't
surprised...

How certain are you that your messages are delivered? When I started digging,
it was scary how often it failed successfully.

~~~
pg4
Was it not a matter of leaving out a country code or something? I was getting
200 OKs and not receiving messages, until I realized that my number without a
+1 in front is a valid Peruvian number.

~~~
dsincl12
Nope, unfortunately not. Really liked their API so it's sad I had to jump
ship.

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vasilakisfil
I am surprised that for smaller countries there is such big difference between
Twilio and MessageBird. For instance, for Albania, in Twilio, the per-number
price is $1.0, and inbound sms are not even supported. On the other hand for
MessageBird the per-number price is $32/month (!) while inbound sms are free.
Feels like MessageBird has more "real" numbers.

Edit: For which ever country I choose from, they always have sms inbound Free.
Feels like a marketing/sales trick ? I can't believe that MessageBird has
managed to implement inbound SMS for all those countries, while Twilio hasn't.

~~~
robertvis
We actually do. Difference is we are direct with the carriers and dont pay
middle man so we can make inbound free in most countries (which is also how
global telecom works from an interoperability standpoint) We also have
numering access across local, mobile , tf in over 150 countries.

~~~
vasilakisfil
Ok thanks for the clarification. I ll definitely look out to use your service.

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newsbinator
Is there a Twilio competitor for which per-minute rates to Belarus aren't ~
$0.50 USD? I remember purchasing "calling cards" in the 90s at convenience
stores with better rates.

~~~
fyfy18
I'm in a nearby (EU) country and the VOIP rates to terminate calls here are
also quite expensive compared to Western EU countries. In a lot of cases it's
actually cheaper to make calls to numbers here on a mobile phone from another
EU country, than over VOIP.

Telephony in general is fairly cheap, so I'm guessing there's only one or two
providers here providing VOIP termination, and without much competition they
price their services as high as enterprise companies who need it will allow.

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objektif
There are many Twilio competitors and there have been for a while now.
However, Twilio has been really resilient in terms of keeping their high
growth year over year. What is the reason for that?

~~~
ihumanable
As a former Twilio engineer, whose opinion in no way represents the company's,
I know that a large part of my job was reliability.

Reliability in the telecom space is a difficult problem, it's a large
ecosystem of providers, aggregators, regulators, and lots and lots of hidden
complexity. Then there's actually running the service, keeping the REST API up
24/7/365, making sure the TwiML processors are processing, keeping everything
humming along smoothly for billions of requests a week.

When I was there, we would see "Twilio Killers" launch once or twice a year,
normally competing around price. Their launches would almost always have the
same 53 countries that they could deliver messages to, which we knew from
operating in the space meant that they had just white-labeled Bandwidth's
offering. They would be relying on a single aggregator and have the same
reliability, resiliency, and reach as that one network.

There's a lot of reasons that people choose Twilio, network effects can't be
denied, a lot of effort was expended on keeping it top of mind in developers
heads. But that only scratches the surface.

We focused a ton on being reliable, being easy-to-use, and on backwards
compatibility. There's a lot of unmaintained WordPress plugins that were
written 9 years ago, abandoned 8 years ago, and still work fine because API
compatibility was a top priority. There's something to be said about being
able to just build an integration and then mostly ignore it and it just hums
along sending SMS out reliably. A developer spending a day debugging a less
reliable service can obliterate the savings in price, sometimes, depending on
volume and use case.

Ease-of-use and network effects shouldn't be discounted. Most mainstream
languages have a reasonably good library, Twilio officially maintained 6 of
them while I was there. Our Developer Education team spent a ton of time and
efforts creating tutorials, quickstarts, blog posts, and presentations. The
Developer Evangelism team could be found at nearly every Hackathon,
Conference, and Meet Up, spreading the word about Twilio, with well-polished
live coding demos that would spark a lot of "Wow moments."

Even knowing exactly how every part of it worked, there's something magical
about a presenter having everyone in the room text a number, then having a 3
line ruby program hit the API, pull down all the messages, and display them in
the terminal. Then with two or three more lines of code, text everyone that
texted in a message. That kind of demo takes maybe 10 minutes to do, but
people would practice and polish it until it was seamless. You could look
around the rooms at some of the events and see the wheels turning in people's
heads as they started thinking about how they could integrate this
functionality into their product.

First-mover, network-effects, reliable, resilient, easy-to-use, and in the
beginning there were a number of highly promoted price drops to keep the
momentum up.

~~~
gamesbrainiac
Thank you for this thoughtful answer. The part about developer advocacy seems
especially important.

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jbverschoor
YC company, but not your usual startup

~~~
throw03172019
Why not a usual startup?

~~~
jbverschoor
Special terms. They already did a few million rev.

~~~
tyre
I don't know anything about the terms or whatever, but we were in the same
batch. It was really funny with the whole batch practicing for Demo Day giving
revenue numbers, growth rate, etc. We had in tens of thousands of dollars per
month in MRR, which was on the higher end.

MessageBird, as you said, came to the US already with a _well_ established
business. Obviously they weren't competing for the same investors/checks as
most of the rest of the batch, but it was still hilarious to hear them pitch
next to everyone else.

~~~
zhoujianfu
Yeah, that was annoying as a demo day participant.. I had flagged messagebird
as the one I was most interested in to put my $25K check into. And then found
out they already had like $50M in revenue I think it was?! Oh well, now I
guess I’ll be able to invest soon..

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raidicy
this probably a dumb question; how do you participate in an ipo?

~~~
kelnos
In general, you don't. The buyers of an IPO are usually large institutional
investors who have been courted directly by the company and the banks managing
the IPO. You can of course try to get in on the first public trades on IPO
day, but you won't get the IPO price (unless things go very wrong for the
company).

Direct listings have been getting a little more popular; in a direct listing a
company just puts their stock up for sale on an exchange without going through
the IPO process, and it just starts trading at whatever the market thinks is
fair. But it's still fairly rare to see a direct listing.

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stevetodd
Aside: Annoying new trend in news sites used here is to inject their homepage
in the browser history to make it so that the back button goes to their
homepage instead of back to where you were.

~~~
wrkronmiller
Didn't happen on Safari Version 14.0. What browser you using?

~~~
stevetodd
Chrome, iOS.

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redis_mlc
Plivo is another Twilio competitor for voice and sms.

Been using it for a while for mostly US sms, works fine:

[https://www.plivo.com/](https://www.plivo.com/)

~~~
rsync
Which, if any, of these Twilio competitors will allow me to CC: a SMS to an
email address _without involving third party providers_ ?

I have begged Twilio engineers in person at multiple Signal and over
email/support channels _as well as_ the CEO and here in this very forum: For
the Love Of God will you please add an 'email' twiml verb ?

If you want to CC: a SMS to email currently, within Twilio, you need to build
functions, sign up for a Sendgrid account, authenticate in sendgrid with _real
names and physical addresses_ ...

It's a no-brainer use-case and it is _nothing but pain_ to implement.

~~~
redis_mlc
> It's a no-brainer

Actually it's not:

First, email and sms are different transport mechanisms.

Second, email requires a To (envelope) address.

Third, some mgmt. like bounce and DKIM/SPF is needed.

You could write a subroutine to hide some of that, but I'm not sure there's a
clear general solution.

~~~
rsync
A few things ...

When I say that it is a no-brainer, I mean that it is a no-brainer _feature_
... that is, something that everyone would have a very ready use-case for.

Second, I think we're all well aware of the vast gulf between email service
and the mobile phone network. That's the point of a service like Twilio: they
have _both_ systems (email and SMS) terminating inside of their own cloud
environment. This means that "forwarding" an SMS to an email address, which
would be rocket science for me, is easy for them.

In fact, it's so easy that we can readily describe exactly how to implement
it: _just give us an email verb in twiml_.

~~~
social_quotient
What’s your use case here? Want to make sure I’m clear on it.

~~~
rsync
"What’s your use case here? Want to make sure I’m clear on it."

There are a lot of ways I would use this, but the basic use-case is as follows
... my primary phone number lives at Twilio and I receive SMS with this simple
twiml:

    
    
      <Response>
      <Message to='+14155551212'>{{From}}: {{Body}}</Message>
      </Response>
    

... and I would simply like to do this:

    
    
      <Response>
      <Message to='+14155551212'>{{From}}: {{Body}}</Message>
      <Message to='me@mydomain.com'>Subject: Incoming SMS {{Body}}</Message>
      </Response>
    

... whatever ... you get the idea. I just want an email verb that I can plug
into twiml and use in programmable messaging.

The immediate issues that comes to mind is spam and unwanted messages, etc.,
but that's easy to solve - just have a simple challenge/response proof that
you own whatever email address you are sending to and only allow people to
send to email addresses they own. I am, after all, just emailing myself.

cc'ing SMS, in programmable messaging, is currently _very very difficult and
time consuming_. You either need to host code at some third party site[1] or
you need to sign up for a sendgrid account (again, third party, additional
account, etc.) and write functions to pass onto the sendgrid account ... but
you can't actually fire off emails from sendgrid unless you authenticate with
actual real names and physical addresses ...

I just want to cc: myself from within twiml. Christ.

[1] [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44768719/can-i-
forward-s...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44768719/can-i-forward-sms-
to-an-email-using-only-a-twiml-bin)

