

Plivo Rolls Out Free Trial Account that Lets You Do Voice Calls and SMS - bevenky
http://plivo.com/blog/free-trial-account-that-lets-you-do-voice-calls-and-sms/

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joe_bleau
Quick comment about the signup procedure; just finished the sign up and phone
number verification, and I'm wondering why I have to enter the '+' in front of
the country code and area code. Your signup form is smart enough to notice
it's missing and let me know to enter it...so why isn't it smart enough to see
that it's missing the leading '+' and just tack it on?

Reminds me a bit of entering a credit card number into a form, only to have
the validation tell me that spaces aren't allowed.

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7cupsoftea
We use Plivo at 7 Cups of Tea. They are great and I highly recommend them.

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bevenky
Thanks Glen for the kind words :)

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sparky
This is great news, thanks guys!

Are there really no limitations on the number of calls and text messages? I
imagine many businesses and other use cases could operate indefinitely with a
single phone number and unlimited calls/texts, so what's preventing 10,000+
customers from never paying a cent, or even reselling your service to others?

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superlucy
@sparky You're correct, we are very aware of that risk, so we do have an
algorithm in place to deter people from abusing the system. With that said,
most users would not get to that limit with regular use while developing.

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shrikrishna
Does 'trial account' mean that it's free only for a limited duration?

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superlucy
Free trial is for life :)

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shrikrishna
Awesome! Thanks for this!

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superlucy
Anytime!

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mwagstaff
Very cool. Just been testing the SMS and text-to-speech API (via their node.js
helper libraries) and it's working well.

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tehwebguy
Can I use the SMS API with this free trial?

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superlucy
Yes, you can definitely do that. However, the your caller ID will be that of
the phone number assigned to you. Upgraded accounts will have the ability to
customize their caller ID.

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tehwebguy
OK, is pricing the same for sending SMS with the trial? Sorry I'm having a
hard time figuring out what is free.

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superlucy
the price for sending out an SMS is technically the same for the trial
account, but you won't be paying for it :)

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superlucy
@tehwebguy Yes, that's right. We want you to use Plivo to the fullest.

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quantumpotato_
This is a competitor to Twilio, yes?

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superlucy
Indeed we are in the same space as Twilio. However, we do have quite a number
of differences. On the technical side, we have dedicated hardware for our
media, which means that our call qualities are consistently great and
drastically increases the number calls which can happen concurrently on our
box. Our framework is also written on FreeSwitch, an open-source telephony
platform. On the non-technical side offer 24/7 chat support at no extra cost
and competitive pricing that just gets better with higher volumes. :)

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toomuchtodo
Definitely like that you guys have your own hardware termination vs where
Twilio is just terminating to Level3's gear.

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tsudot
Thanks for the confidence. We think that decoding/encoding of audio on
dedicated hardware works best for call quality and we are really focussed on
doing that.

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chinmoy
What happens to the $10 credit developer accounts that was offered before?

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dhfromkorea
Hi @chinmoy. It's DH from Plivo here.

Interesting question: your old Developer account actually had more limitations
than the new Free Trial accounts. For example, you couldn't have made outbound
voice calls to regular numbers via PSTN.

You can check out the full comparison here:
[http://plivo.com/faq/basics/whats-the-difference-between-
fre...](http://plivo.com/faq/basics/whats-the-difference-between-free-trial-
account-and-developer-account/)

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dcc1
No possibility of receiving SMS?

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dhfromkorea
Hi, yes you can. You need to append a 'message url' to your Plivo app:

check out the message section at
[http://plivo.com/docs/xml/request/](http://plivo.com/docs/xml/request/)

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dcc1
Oh ok, its just not very clear unlike twilio

edit: those api docs are as clear as mud, no example on how to receive an SMS

