What is your strategy for when Twilio goes away?
Not OP, but I am honestly curious to know why you think they will go anywhere soon. Could you please elaborate?
Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
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Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#32What is your strategy for when Twilio goes away?
I too would like to know what the thought behind this question is. They are a well established company that runs 2FA and awesome phone apis / systems for thousands of startups and large companies in a field that is high barrier of entry (less competition) and predictable profits since they meter their usage.
The only thing I can think of is if a competitor enters the space and blows them away. In which case, there is your answer, you go to whomever blew them away.
I can't imagine a lawsuits or something like that taking them down at this point. They have been around too long, it would have happened already.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#33How is this different from the hundreds of VOIP services out there?
I don't think this qualifies as VOIP. It's not even POTS or mobile. It is just an interface for an API.
Although with that said... knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#34Such thing can be created in a few lines of JavaScript code via Voximplant BTW, anyone interested in a tutorial? I can create one.
Yes, go ahead, write the tut.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#35Such thing can be created in a few lines of JavaScript code via Voximplant BTW, anyone interested in a tutorial? I can create one.
Op got downvoted a lot (and perhaps deserves it because of the tone of his post) but makes a valid point.
This is nothing like dropbox. This is barely a hello world app on the Twilio platform. I have little doubt he could write a tutorial to walk people through it in an hour two two.
This would be a good analogy if you dropbox was literally just provisioning a user and setting an FTP password. And if it was, Dropbox would hit scaling problems on almost day one.
This won't hit scaling problems because it doesn't do anything... Twilio's API has built-in API calls for all this stuff and the webhooks can (and should) be hosted on AWS Lambda or Google Cloud Functions for pretty much free with automatic scaling.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#36How is this different from the hundreds of VOIP services out there?
I don't think this qualifies as VOIP. It's not even POTS or mobile. It is just an interface for an API. Although with that said... knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day.
>>knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day.
I don't want to shit on the idea, but with the amount of "build this thing with twilio" content twilio puts out, the benefit of this is saving the time of setting something similar up for yourself.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like this is "bring your own number". It's neat, but I wouldn't trust this site to stay up under any kind of stress, which means my number would be erratically dead. If the source is available though, this is neat enough I'd consider self-hosting it.
It's hosted on a paid Heroku instance, our own company number is served by this. The server didn't break a sweat with this HN traffic.
That's not reassuring. It's a free service that could shut down at any time. It's lovely, but I would never use it directly for anything serious unless I could pay for it.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this qualifies as VOIP. It's not even POTS or mobile. It is just an interface for an API. Although with that said... knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day.
>>knowing the Twilio API and looking at this design I think someone could build this in about a day. I don't want to shit on the idea, but with the amount of "build this thing with twilio" content twilio puts out, the benefit of this is saving the time of setting something similar up for yourself.
Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to debate buy vs. build. Although if I was going to buy there are much more robust services also built on-top of Twilio.
Just the op asked "what makes this different" and I was pointing out that the barrier of entry is very low.
With that said, if you already know the Twilio API and you already know AWS Lambda + API Gateway + DynamoDB it might be worth it to build because:
1. It would be extensible for your needs.
2. It would be a heck of a lot of fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.
Edit: I can speak to point #2 personally. I have done it. It is a lot of fun... especially for a developer who usually lives in a web browser... to be able to call a phone number and hear the result of your code. It is very satisfying. Much like building an Alexa skill is or finally getting that LED display to light up on your breadboard and print something.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#39Such thing can be created in a few lines of JavaScript code via Voximplant BTW, anyone interested in a tutorial? I can create one.
Op got downvoted a lot (and perhaps deserves it because of the tone of his post) but makes a valid point. This is nothing like dropbox. This is barely a hello world app on the Twilio platform. I have little doubt he could write a tutorial to walk people through it in an hour two two. This would be a good analogy if you dropbox was literally just provisioning a user and setting an FTP password. And if it was, Dropbox…
It's actually a feature. It saved you one day of your life. And if this free service just disappears some day, you are just one day away to build your own. You got your number from Twilio, there is no lock-in.
Re: Show HN: A virtual phone number for your company based on Twilio
#40What is your strategy for when Twilio goes away?
I too would like to know what the thought behind this question is. They are a well established company that runs 2FA and awesome phone apis / systems for thousands of startups and large companies in a field that is high barrier of entry (less competition) and predictable profits since they meter their usage. The only thing I can think of is if a competitor enters the space and blows them away. In which case, there is…
Adding to my own post (and thinking out-loud)... I can potentially imagine an acquisition and the acquiring company deciding to shut it down.
But the chances of that are so remote I'd still feel comfortable putting mission critical systems on it.