Twilio quietly increase international SMS Price without letting you know

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6912831

by coolboykl • 13 years ago

17 3 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

If you are using Twilio as your SMS GW.. Please be warn that Twilio will increase their SMS Price without given you any warning..

SMS Price for a number of Asia Countries has increase to 200 to 300% , I only found out that when I trouble shooting SMS deliver problem at Twilio developer Portal

Here's Twilio CSR reply to me..

"Thanks for your feedback. We've discussed the addition of the pro-active notifications feature that you request, and it looks like that our team will not have the bandwidth to dedicate the engineering resources necessary to build that addition to our services in the near future.

If you would like to track pricing changes in real time from your side, the best way forward would be to schedule a daily script that will pull the current Global SMS rates from our CSV file and compare those rates to those downloaded from that file on previous days."

This is very bad..

Imagine that if you have spent on average USD 5,000 every month on sending international SMS, and out of sudden, you are paying USD 15,000, because Twilio just quietly increase the price without letting us know, so that we can find better alternatives..

Compare the SMS rates from the CSV file daily will not work, because new price already take effect.. and we still needs time to find better alternative, and do the necessary integration..at the end the losing end, is us...

route3• 13 years ago

Yes, this is surprising. Twilio has a reputation of being awfully transparent -- they had a billing systems issue back in July and handled it quite well, IIRC. They also do a great job with their developer evangelist program.

I wonder if someone has created a pricing matrix/table that updates and compares the SMS/voice API providers. For example, I know Plivo is slightly cheaper for SMS, domestically (USA). A price comparison table might make a good holiday project :)

Although I understand this wouldn't help your case. As you pointed out, the SMS provider would have already increased rates by the time you could be notified of increases.

coolboykl• 13 years ago

Here's reply from Twilio CSR

" Hi James,

Thanks again for providing all of the detailed comments concerning the advanced notifications for pricing changes. Your points are sound, and I understand that especially for customers with high volume use cases, relying on the pricing CSV file would not remove the costs of sudden price changes and would pose an the obstacle to the pro-active re-routing of traffic.

I've shared all of your comments with our product team, and I'll let you know as soon as I have more information concerning potential pricing change notifications. This would be a major change in the way that we price our Global SMS service, but I hope to be able to pass along some comments from our team by the beginning of next week.

We appreciate your thoughts about our SMS service and our pricing. I'll provide an update as soon as I can."

oneapi4sms• 13 years ago

What if there was a service that aggregated pricing from Twilio, Nexmo, and other SMS GWs and send pricing updates on a daily basis. We don't have that capability at www.oneapi4sms.com yet, but that is something we could do as we pull this data now. But if we did this, would you and others pay for it?

Twilio quietly increase international SMS Price without letting you know

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