Awesome work Twilio, been looking forward to being able to play around with SMS as much as I have calls without having to use a US number.
Important Note for non-UK Customers: if you would like to use a UK number for SMS please note that this is a domestic messaging product for sending messages to UK numbers only. Additionally, we are not able to guarantee delivery of international senders sending messages from non-UK phone numbers or from locaitons outside the UK.
This isn't something I've come across before - have I just ignored it from other services, or is this an issue unique to Twilio? Not that it will be of much importance I don't think.
Its not a huge issue, but we found some customers were getting confused and since the majority of our customer base is still in the U.S. right now we're trying to make things as clear as possible. In the ideal world, you'd be able to seamlessly send text messages anywhere in the world, but that's now how it works with Twilio... yet.
#1 and #3 on the Google search were both a bit vague, mentioning only a fixed rate monthly charge of £5 and £7.50 per month for a number to receive messages on.
They didn't mention whether they charge per message received, but every other price is unambiguous so I'd probably read it as them not charging for receipt of messages beyond the line rental but for the sake of argument didn't want to jump to that conclusion.
The Twilio price is good though, I was finding outbound rates closer to 4p per SMS and only dropping down to 2p per SMS with serious quantity paid in advance.
The UK based sms service I use doesn't. But theres a monthly fee for the number. I'm sure this was the case with others when I was shopping around as well (again, UK based).
At Twilio are focused on creating a platform that enables developers to build value-added applications for their customers. To this end, we have never offered a product that allows developers to send out messages without a number to receive replies. We believe two-way messaging offers our developers the ability to create unique application experiences and has real value to our developer community. As such, we choose to be agressive with cheap outbound pricing and charge for incoming messages.
This is our first foray in to SMS outside of North America though so please send me feedback on your thoughts at patrick [at] twilio
From the documentation, it seems that you need to set a "from" number when sending an SMS. Does anyone know why this would be the case? Is it possible to send no-reply style SMS messages with this service?
I'm thinking along the lines of phone number verification, and I wouldn't want to be charged if people accidentally replied to the message.
Just to confirm (as it's a real number), if a user sends an SMS to that number, but no URL is associated with it, will I be charged? I would assume not, but worth checking!
Important Note for non-UK Customers: if you would like to use a UK number for SMS please note that this is a domestic messaging product for sending messages to UK numbers only. Additionally, we are not able to guarantee delivery of international senders sending messages from non-UK phone numbers or from locaitons outside the UK.
This isn't something I've come across before - have I just ignored it from other services, or is this an issue unique to Twilio? Not that it will be of much importance I don't think.