

Twilio SMS price halved to a penny per message - jonknee
http://www.twilio.com/pricing/

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ccollins
First of all, I love Twilio, have used it in production apps, and will
continue to use it in production apps.

Just want to give a heads up about a very big limitation of Twilio SMS: It
only delivers to US and Canadian phone numbers
(<http://www.twilio.com/faq/international>). If you are building an app with
any sort of international user base, you will need to look elsewhere.
Clickatell has an API, delivers to almost every country, but their interface,
billing, and customer support are painfully terrible.
(<http://www.clickatell.com/products/gateway.php>).

So Twilio, do you plan to introduce International SMS support?

~~~
johns
We currently have it in beta. You can sign up for access here:
<http://www.twilio.com/international-sms> (Note that page says 2c/msg, but it
is 1c/msg in the beta as well)

~~~
chrislomax
I wish I had read the FAQs properly, didn't realise you couldn't send
international! I signed up for your beta though, I want to do SMS messaging
from the app but I have always found other services so expensive, I used to
use Esendex in the UK but the plans drain cash so quickly.

I just wanted to send despatch confirmations through an ecommerce application.
If you could do it for 3-4p GBP that would still be very cheap.

Signed up and ready to go on the beta though

~~~
jonknee
Their current international pricing matches domestic, so you'd be paying about
.6p GBP. Cheap cheap.

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relix
Exactly 30 days after competitor Tropo lowered their SMS prices to a penny per
message: [http://blog.tropo.com/2011/05/11/announcing-new-lower-sms-
pr...](http://blog.tropo.com/2011/05/11/announcing-new-lower-sms-pricing/)

The joys of competition :-)

~~~
dmor
Just to avoid any confusion for Twilio customers on this thread, we lowered
SMS pricing to $0.01/message on the evening of May 20th (yes, Tropo went
first), so that is what you'll see reflected in your Twilio account. The
reason there is so much buzz today is because we just announced the change
today in our newsletter/blog, along with the release of the new "Apps" feature
in the developer dashboard.

We're proud to keep reducing prices for SMS, first from the original $0.03
down to $0.02 back in September, and now this price cut. It's our customers
and their business that make this possible, through better economies of scale
that allow us to reduce SMS cost for developers while still making it
financially viable for us as a business. Affordable SMS is opening up
incredible use cases.

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fuzzmeister
This is incredible. The lowest price advertised by Clickatell is $0.012/msg,
and that price can only be reached by paying for 500,000 messages or more -
that is, paying $6000 or more.

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jonknee
This has to be welcome news for GroupMe and other Twilio SMS heavy startups.

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gscott
I hate to be downbeat but I am using Twilio for my next service and I would
prefer to have Twilio stay in business for the next 10 years then to lower
prices to a cut rate amount.

~~~
johns
We'd prefer to stay in business too! We're growing and as we get bigger we get
better rates that we can pass on to you and the numbers still work. So you can
have both: lower prices and we'll still be around in 10 years (and hopefully
the next 50 years after that).

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jmadnick
It is fascinating to see the market develop so fast. I have created
<http://www.longnumbers.com> as an industry portal. I need feedback. Please
tell me what y'all think.

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jolan
Any hope of reducing the outbound calls to 1c/min as well?

It's cheaper for me to use <http://flowroute.com/> \+ Asterisk directly than
twilio.

~~~
johns
We've had 3 price drops on our services in the past year, so while I don't
have anything I can promise you for outbound calls, we're committed to giving
you the best price we are able to provide.

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d135-1r43
Does anyone know an European service that is as great as Twilio? All provider
here in Germany suck more or less, offer a bad API and are totally overpriced.

~~~
relix
Check Tropo.com. It accepts customers from outside the US and international
SMS's are 2 cents a piece. Not all operators are supported, though. E.g. there
is one operator in Belgium Tropo doesn't send to. Your mileage may vary
(Germany will probably be better covered).

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jrockway
Nice, now only $65 per megabyte. You could txt someone an entire Blu-Ray disk
for only $3.3 million!

~~~
stanleydrew
Yes, the prices carriers set are ridiculous. But we all still use and love SMS
for some reason.

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daimyoyo
IDK if they are aimed at the same market, but HeyWire messages are free.

~~~
jonknee
Completely separate market. Twilio is targeted at business applications--
sending and receiving SMS via an API. It's not meant so you can text your
friend, it's meant so you can enable SMS in your app. The pricing has fallen
quite a bit, it was 3 cents per message when SMS functionality was introduced
in Feb 2010.

