
AWS Pinpoint Launches Two-Way Text Messaging - artsandsci
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-pinpoint-launches-two-way-text-messaging/
======
johns
Powered by Twilio:
[https://twitter.com/jeffiel/status/912775401084035072](https://twitter.com/jeffiel/status/912775401084035072)

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sjtgraham
"helping to power"

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yalph
Can someone provide clarity on this pls?

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WisNorCan
Twilio's stock started dropping [1] with this announcement. Jeff Lawson wants
to protect his stock price and restless employees (I am sure there is an
internal email forthcoming as well).

The worst (possibly realistic) reading of "Helping to power" is that Twilio
confirmed that they are just one of many companies that are powering this
solution for Amazon. The implication is that Amazon will keep playing these
companies against each other to drive down rates.

[1]
[https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWLO](https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:TWLO)

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WisNorCan
Disclosure: Short TWLO.

If you look at Amazon's playbook (e.g. in Retail and Transportation), Twilio
should be concerned:

1) Partnering with Twilio and other aggregators gives Amazon a fast path to
market with broad reach. This is consistent with how they have approached
groceries, transportation and other verticals.

2) Amazon is willing to be aggressive on price to win market share. They have
already undercut Twilio and they will no doubt continue lowering rates as
needed. The current rates are still very high relative to SMS cost and they
will come down.

3) Amazon is establishing the relationship directly with developers. Others
have tried to do this on price (e.g. Plivo) but they haven't had the developer
base and Twilio has been great on developer marketing. AWS is very formidable
here. Note that Twilio had to come out and say that they were a partner.

4) The reality is most of Twilio's business is on the most basic APIs for
making phone calls and SMS messages. Twilio may have a lot of other
capabilities, but 99% of them don't matter. In addition, AWS will keep adding
capabilities.

5) AWS will keep asking Twilio for price concessions at each negotiation
renewal point and RFP aggressively. With more volume they will have more
power. Given the commodity nature of SMS, there is not much Twilio can do
about it.

6) You can look at the position UPS is in to get a sense of how this can play
out. Amazon will chip away at the most lucrative parts of the business and
look at going direct. Leaving UPS (or Twilio) with the less interesting edge
cases.

The one counter I have read is that porting out of all the markets will be
complicated for Amazon. If Amazon has done a reasonable job with vendor
contracts, they will have the right to selectively renew or port-out on a per
market basis.

There is a scenario in which Amazon acquires Twilio. It might happen. But
never bet on a company because you hope they will be acquired.

EDIT: It may actually be worse for Twilio given Jeff Lawson’s tweet. “Helping
to power” seems to indicate that Twilio is just one of several vendors as
opposed to “powered by Twilio”. Can someone from AWS or Twilio confirm?

~~~
ad93611
We use both Twilio and Plivo in our text messaging products in CallHub. Both
are great vendors to work with. We'll not move to Amazon just for a lower
price. The things that we value are,

1\. Quality of delivery

2\. A consistent API across all our telephony needs.

3\. Great support when we need it

I especially love the fact that these vendors are constantly innovating and
give us early access to those innovations as well. The most recent was
Twilio's release of studio.

~~~
WisNorCan
CallHub probably has more demanding requirements for a call and SMS platform
than most customers. If I understand your business correctly you provide robo-
calling (!) services for political parties. Most companies use Twilio in very
basic ways.

In terms of innovation in SMS and telephony, there are also numerous ways you
can see Amazon surpassing Twilio. For example, combining speech detection,
automation, etc. from Alexa with their platform.

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aditya
Hmm. Interesting.

Cheaper (~0.65c) per SMS than twilio (~0.75c) in the US, great if you're
already on AWS and support for sending to 200+ countries[1] but no MMS support
that I can see...

[1][http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channel...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channels-
sms-countries.html)

~~~
m3kw9
Amazon got volume discount I’m sure, and provides marketing for twillo

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aviv
No need for volume. SMS is dirt cheap on its own. For my clients we implement
custom SMS solutions and our wholesale rates are free inbound and 0.0018
outbound. And we can activate any off-net number, don't need to own it even.

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HatchedLake721
0.0018? What country?

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bob_theslob646
What country?

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gruez
SMS rates vary depending on which country/telecom it's sent to/from.

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sgarg
The 200+ countries is slightly misleading, especially when the title mentions
_two-way_ messaging. I've done a lot of research into messaging/SMS providers
like Twilio, Nexmo, Plivo, etc for supporting two-way messaging in developing
countries. Most providers currently only support two-way messaging in similar
subset of countries in North America and Europe. Since it is powered by
Twilio, I don't think it adds any new countries and definitely not 200.

[https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-
us/articles/223183068-Twili...](https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-
us/articles/223183068-Twilio-international-phone-number-availability-and-
their-capabilities)

~~~
ranman
Pinpoint works with multiple partners and carriers. You can get the list of
countries here:
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channel...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channels-
sms-countries.html)

Disclaimer: I wrote the post and work for AWS

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sgarg
Thanks for the reply. Are you saying that all of these countries support _two-
way_ messaging? It's my impression after signing up and looking at pricing
pages that many of these countries only support _outbound_ messaging.

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ranman
You're totally right. We'll update the list of countries that support 2-way
messaging in the docs in the next few days. It's ~50 or so.

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wslh
Twilio stocks down:
[https://finance.google.com/finance?q=twilio&ei=CqXKWZC4MY-
_e...](https://finance.google.com/finance?q=twilio&ei=CqXKWZC4MY-_esO6lNgP)

~~~
iiv
Which is weird because AWS Pinpoint is powered by Twilio[1]

[1][https://twitter.com/jeffiel/status/912775401084035072](https://twitter.com/jeffiel/status/912775401084035072)

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nothrabannosir
It’s probably in the api lock in. Amazon can switch to another provider once
they’ve got a better deal elsewhere, and customers need not notice. They’re
commoditising twilio, which is not a great place to be in, for stock.

(Alternatively: Amz ends up buying twilio and the market was wrong :) )

~~~
sjtgraham
I don't think this is what's happening but would be an interesting acquisition
strategy. Spook the market into offloading Twilio, driving the price down
before they make their move.

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sergiotapia
The UI is garbage but that's par for the course with AWS I guess.

~~~
DarronWyke
Given how AWS tends to move to a policy of "we do what we want", I'm not
surprised. I've had EC2 and SES send out spam for weeks without mitigation
despite complaints.

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ranman
EC2 has limits for how much SMTP they can do by default. SES has similar
controls in place. They take the fight against spam very seriously. If you
wanna let me know specifics randhunt@amazon.com I'd be happy to help take care
of the issue.

~~~
DarronWyke
No offense, but that's rich. I've emailed abuse, sent public notifications
through Twitter, and more. Received silence.

I've had spam campaigns -- open spam campaigns, complete with scraped emails,
dubious subjects, and more -- last for 3+ weeks before finally getting shut
down. I wouldn't call that "taking the fight seriously".

~~~
ranman
If you received no response at all from the abuse alias then something is
wrong there and I want to fix it.

You’re welcome to email me or link to the tweets or ping me directly on
twitter @jrhunt. I personally take it seriously and I will get things taken
care of. HN isn’t a great forum to dive deep on individual support though so
feel free to take the convo to email or twitter DM.

Randhunt@amazon.com

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pnikosis
Delivery rates on AWS are not great in my experience, and there's no easy way
to automate some kind of event triggering when a delivery has failed (ended up
creating a lambda that reads the fail events from cloud watch). Plus, you have
to specify a monthly spending limit that must be manually reviewed and enabled
by Amazon, if you go over the limit, Amazon starts failing the SMS delivery,
even when SNS responds with a successful status.

AWS is great, but the biggest advantage of Twilio and other SMS providers is
that they are way easier and straightforward to integrate.

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bdcravens
One thing I like about AWS is they keep pushing forward. You'd think they
would have held this until AWS Reinvent, which is only 2 months (edit: was
originally "weeks", doh!) away.

~~~
amrrs
I think it's a simple way of figuring out potential products and services that
are cross-selling opportunities for their existing customer base in order to
increase their Average Pocket Share. As it turns out, everything that they
push forward is something someone is already offering to their customers and
hence 'Why not us' while all it takes is some new devs or existing devs to
work on copying an existing service and offering a cheap refined version of
it.

Edit: I'm not trying to undermine the challenge or business incumbence
requirements. It's just not a risky innovative proposition.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I presume they can analyze any requests/traffic and figure out which services
their customers are using. Talk about a competitive advantage.

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drewnick
I wonder what happens if someone calls the phone number after receiving an SMS
text. The FAQ/docs don't seem to address this.

~~~
oliyoung
In Australia at least, it doesn't connect/you get a busy tone

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voiper1
I thought this was supposed to be... 2 way. But an Israel SMS just says from
"NOTICE" and I can't even respond to it.

~~~
gondo
"For countries that require an alphabetic sender ID, the message displays
NOTICE as the sender ID."
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channel...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channels-
sms-countries.html)

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thecybernerd
Looks like Amazon is gunning for Twilio

~~~
Dotnaught
Just speculating here, but it wouldn't be surprising if Amazon ultimately
acquired Twilio. CEO Jeff Lawson used to work for Amazon after all.

~~~
samstave
his is likely a dry run on how well it can integrate... and what adoption
levels... then they will buy Twilio. Buy some twilio stock now.

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wonder_bread
Doesn't bode well for Twilio that Amazon keeps rolling out these ecosystem-
enhancing SMS features. They're still a standout solution for anybody who
doesn't use AWS IMP but these features are getting a little too close for
comfort

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dpcx
Twilio's advantage is that they have amazing API documentation, and extremely
low barrier to entry.

~~~
zitterbewegung
Yea, I tried to use SNS today but couldn't find any example code for Python. I
got frustrated and signed up with twilio. After signing up and doing their
test I was able to click directly to the Python example.

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ranman
1\. I love Twilio and I recommend it over pinpoint most of the time. The API
is objectively easier and the documentation is better.

2.

    
    
        import boto3
        sns = boto3.client('sns')
        number = '+12345678900'
        sns.publish(PhoneNumber=number, Message='Hello, World')
    

Disclaimer: I work for AWS and wrote the post

~~~
marksomnian
OT: why on Earth would you call your library _boto3_ , instead of something
obvious, like _aws_?

I can't be the first person who was confused by this.

~~~
ranman
This would be a good Quora question for Mitch Garnaat.

[https://twitter.com/jrhunt/status/913087294222905344](https://twitter.com/jrhunt/status/913087294222905344)

[https://github.com/boto/boto3/issues/1023](https://github.com/boto/boto3/issues/1023)

[http://acsonline.org/fact-sheets/boto-amazon-river-
dolphin/](http://acsonline.org/fact-sheets/boto-amazon-river-dolphin/)

~~~
ranman
Here's the right twitter link sorry:
[https://twitter.com/garnaat/status/913093232917086209](https://twitter.com/garnaat/status/913093232917086209)

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ValentineC
Just a heads-up: AWS Pinpoint text messaging cannot be paid with credits.

I just checked my bill and was charged $0.18 for sending three test messages
to myself.

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IanCal
What is it that makes SMS so expensive to send in the UK?

Cost in the US: 0.645-0.75¢ per message

Cost in the UK: up to 7+¢ per message to send, inbound 0.9¢

I get that there are differences, but a factor of 10 is quite a shift. Twilio
is 4¢ too if you want to send from an actual mobile number.

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aviv
One more step closer to the end game... Business Hosted VOIP. They're already
doing SMS, call center and a bunch of other stuff in this space. Hosted PBX
and SIP trunking is coming. They are on a VOIP/WebRTC hiring spree since last
year.

~~~
homero
[https://aws.amazon.com/connect/](https://aws.amazon.com/connect/)

~~~
aviv
Yes, as I mentioned call center, and they also have Chime for conferencing. I
expect trunking and business voip to be released very soon.

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gabeh
AWS is doing a great job producing more and more sticky features.

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Fomite
Is there a straightforward method for _charging_ a customer for those texts?

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zhyan7109
Is this available outside of the US/Canada?

~~~
zhyan7109
nvm,
[http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channel...](http://docs.aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/latest/userguide/channels-
sms-countries.html)

