When are they going to get SMS enabled numbers in Canada?
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)
A thousand times this. One of my projects is SMS heavy, and I had to switch it to Tropo because Twilio wouldn't do Canadian numbers. The developer experience has been far inferior.
The developer experience isn't even the worst of it. Try running some reliability testing. It's mind blowing how bad Tropo is and how many random hidden variables exist in their system.
Which is really sad when you consider the problem. API accepts SMS and inserts into database; workers take queue from database and action against SMS gateways (works in reverse for messages going the other way).
I'm Diggz, Chief Evangelist at Tropo. I'm sorry you had a negative experience with Tropo. We're constantly improving our docs and services and would love to hear any feedback you have. I was recently made aware of your SMS load test with Canadian numbers and I believe with a couple of tweaks, we can get those SMS's cruising along.
For SMS-only apps that don't use voice or speech recognition, we also have http://SMSified.com which is a RESTful API based on the GSMA standard for SMS - launching in international beta soon (U.S only ATM).
International SMS is tricky (as most will agree) but we do have many devs and customers using our Tropo Canadian SMS service without performance issues. One of the reasons we don't charge developers to test on Tropo is because we know it takes time (and lots of testing) to make an app that your customers will be able to trust and rely upon. Feel free to email me at diggz at tropo dot com.
I definitely recognize that SMS is a tough problem, so I sympathize as an engineer. That being said, as a customer I don't care about any of that, I just want it to work.
Simple test: send more than 1 message from a phone number in the span of 15 seconds during a bulk test. At random Tropo will drop the second message because the first one hasn't gone through yet on your system. No error message, nothing, it just drops the data. I know why it does this, I've read the docs, but that's a crazy "feature"! why can't you queue it like Twilio does? that's just one example. Don't even get me started on your logging system. There's no sane way to get reports! none!
We looked at SMSified and even tried to use their Canadian numbers (somehow we got a few Canadian SMS enabled numbers even though we were told it's not supported.) That thing was basically unusable. Delivery rates of around 60%, with totally random inexplicable failures.
Twilio on the other hand has been awesome. No weirdness, very reasonable defaults, rock solid performance, good logs. Just very pleasant to use in general.
I appreciate the feedback and I also agree with you on several points. Tropo's logging today IS incredibly verbose and I've been working with our product dev team to filter it to make it more developer-friendly.
You are correct that Tropo does not have built-in queueing today and I also agree that it should at least let you know if it can't deliver a message.
Better reporting is also at the top of our list for the next rev.
Again, thanks for taking the time to give me your feedback. I think you'll be pleased to see these suggestions baked into the next version of Tropo. +) Diggz
I'd say pretty soon. They had a sign up for a canadian sms beta on their website a couple of weeks back. Our company got in; still a few bugs for them to work out, but it is a fantastic service!
Seeing that Eurpoean countries have a population in the range of Canada one might think Canada should rank well in the queue with european countries for Twilio attention.
I'm not sure what the hold up is either, I have an app in Twilio that's being held back by the Polite Canadians needing SMS and I can't get mad at them, and am having to consider moving everything to Tropo or something else... Tropo reviews thus far here don't seem encouraging.
I encourage you to try Tropo, we have thousands of very happy developers in our community and we're constantly absorbing feedback and baking it into our platform. Plus it's completely free for developers :)
I was lucky enough to sit next to Evan (CTO) at a recent conference dinner and he took the time to explain some of the complex relationships they have, or are developing, with international telcos. From our conversation it seems that most of the issues in the complaints here stem from the difficulty of setting up those relationships and the cost associated with using the existing infrastructure.
I'm not sure if anyone from Twilio can comment but maybe someone with some relevant experience can.
"We’re in the UK and will be rolling out to the rest of Europe in the next couple months.”"
Their move to the UK was very half-assed, still no SMS support for the UK... :( I hope they fix that with this new funding before they expand elsewhere.
Twilio UK SMS is in rolling beta right now. Please feel free to email me at danielle(at)twilio(dot)com and I'll do what I can to get you added, the queue is quite long so if you applied and haven't gotten that might be why. We are definitely aware of the extremely high demand for this service, not just in the UK but across Europe and beyond, and our engineers are working around the clock to get it out the door and in your hands at the level of quality and reliability our customers have come to expect from Twilio.
Cheaper, more reliable (we tried both the above), delivery receipts, works in almost every country. If you just want the USA, Twilio is acceptable - I think Twilio crushes it at things other than their SMS gateway though.
I've perused the site and understand the functionality but don't see where such high demand is coming from. A few people are commenting here that they use it to send SMS, which makes sense, but I'm having trouble conceptualizing large use cases besides text/call user for confirmation of some action or sending a large alert to many users.
My mental summary keeps coming back to "push notifications without an app installed and to any phone". (I'm not implying that's insignificant.) Is that off base?
Its phone infrastructure in the cloud, which provides dead-simple server-side integration. They provide the telephone infrastructure, so you can focus on your application. This might include IVR style applications, SMS, voice mail, etc.
If you use Rails, try out @stevegraham's twilio-rb gem.
It's difficult to enter the world of telecom IVR, the barrier of entry is very high, and to do anything at a large scale requires a large up-front investment.
Twilio makes telecom IVR as simple as writing a web application, and they're very affordable with no up-front costs.
I've written custom emergency notification systems, call-in contests, intelligent call forwarding systems (you could replicate Google Voice). Any phone app you can think of can be constructed.
Twillio is great for getting a small app out the door. But if you need to scale it and get any advanced form of call control it doesn't support it. It also is a lot more difficult to move away from it if you need to scale out and use other systems. With Tropo you can integrate it with Adhearsion and then as you need to scale move it to Rayo or Asterisk......and you also are not limited to the currently supported countries with Either offering. Tropo allows you to set up your own endpoint in a country they don't support and will integrate that in. So if you are in a South American country, or any place that Twillio doesn't support it is the only game in town.
It's a good service, but unless they bring prices way down, some big provider (Cough Amazon..) is going to come in and eat their lunch. Granted they probably wouldn't offer the level of detailed APIs that Twillio does.
We started using them for SMS sending but went with Nexmo at a fraction of the cost.
I believe their exit strategy is to be acquired by Amazon or someone of their scale. They drive their entire platform on Amazon AWS and the Rackspace cloud system, and Jeff (one of the Twilio co-founders) was previously the product manager for AWS.
I went to both Twiliocon and interviewed with Twilio. They're very smart guys, but the problem is that its a race to the bottom. Their idea is innovative (webapps <-> telco integration), but anyone can do it once they learn how to handle the SMS messages between the web and the carrier gateways, as well as how to handle call flows with Asterisk or Freeswitch.
Also, to me, it appears they're swimming upstream. Everyone else is moving towards unlimited voice/sms, while they're trying to stick to per minute/per sms rates (even for their VoIP offering!).
Awesome idea, excellent execution, not a long term business model.
Twilio should take some of the money and invest it in allowing customers to send SMS internationally. There Beta has to been going on for at least 2 months?? Please Twilio. Thank you.
Expanding internationally is a wonderful thing, Twilio will go far if they bring their wonderful API to many countries.
I just hope they take some of that investment and bring basic voice recognition to their product, and perhaps some more TTS voices (some Loquendo voices would be grand!).
I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I will immediately switch over $10k/month in business to them as soon as they do that. The other providers are disastrously bad (yes, that includes Tropo.)