Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API • Hacker News Board

Re: Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API

#41

Post by Vindexus » Tue, Feb 09, 2010, 11:42 PM UTC

almost wrote: post #40

"Previously, building SMS apps was hard... " Is this true? In the UK at least it's been ridiculously simple and cheap to build SMS apps for years. I've built several and the last I had up and running in an hour from start to finish. What's a little harder (for me anyway) is coming up with ideas for SMS services that are actually useful. The rest of Twilio's stuff looks awesome though, I wish they'd bring it to the UK…

Yes it's definitely true. Most of the options are very expensive, or not available in Canada (where I live).

Re: Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API

#42

Post by tectonic » Wed, Feb 10, 2010, 1:58 AM UTC

rokhayakebe wrote: post #4

djb_hackernews wrote: post #2

Am I the only one that thinks someone is going to build a killer service on top of Twilio? Something to become a household name and be totally disruptive.

Twilio has by far one of the best APIs out there. Most APIs hands you back data, Twilio does "stuff" so you do not have to.

Who else would you include in this category?

Re: Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API

#43

Post by gridspy » Wed, Feb 10, 2010, 2:19 AM UTC

oconnor0 wrote: post #38

gridspy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since you are already paying $3 per minute for the 100 messages.

http://www.twilio.com/pricing-signup says that it's 3 cents/SMS - which, yes, works out to be $3 - but not because it's per minute.

My point is that you have 86,400 seconds in a day. Well before you are spending $864 per day maxing out the number of messages you can send, you have $1 in the bank to get another number.

But then again, having a bank of 100 phone numbers just to send the million messages you want to send within an hour sounds slightly annoying from a logistics perspective.

Re: Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API

#44

Post by jdunck » Wed, Feb 10, 2010, 5:03 AM UTC

iPhone SMS allows forwarding of SMS messages. Is this a common feature of phones? Of smartphones, or more?

Re: Introducing Our Ridiculously Simple Twilio SMS API

#45

Post by eapen » Wed, Feb 10, 2010, 5:17 AM UTC

This is going to pose some competition to TextMarks - which has a very powerful, yet simple API. This works out to be cheaper although you don't get the shortcode like TextMarks has. Glad to see Clickatel is facing some competition.