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Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

twilio.com

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Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#61

Post by tyingq »

rabidonrails wrote: post #54
beaconstudios wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's amazing that phaxio have gotten away with such high prices for so long.

Phaxio founder here. Our pricing might seem higher (and may be in certain situations), but it works a bit differently that Twilio's. Twilio charges you the 1c _plus_ the costs of the call. Phaxio is an "all in" rate _including_ retrying the call. And, at Phaxio, if the calls all fail there's no cost to you. I'm not saying that we won't adjust our pricing (#competition), but there's a difference in the actual unit cos…

How long does it take, on average, to send a page?

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#62

Post by ybot »

bambax wrote: post #39
patio11 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the Uber-for-food-delivery startups use them for ordering at restaurants because there is no text-based API to restaurants and the UX of receiving an automated phone call is poor. They're pervasive in finance, insurance, employee benefits, etc. They're also a good one-to-many API multiplexer. So many businesses can take a fax and have a human operate on it that many software companies can use them to add act…

> food-delivery So it's easier/cheaper for a restaurant to have a dedicated phone line for faxing (plus fax and supplies) than connect a printer to a PC? Is this because someone needs to actually print incoming emails or orders? And if yes, is there an opportunity for some kind of software solution that would always print what it receives, with no human intervention?

The short answer is 'yes' — fax machines are actually a pretty great solution to this problem. If you think about it, there isn't really that much overhead for having a fax line and a $40 fax machine vs running a full computer + printer combo, set up is trivial, faxes have a very well-understood track record, and the 'sender' gets direct feedback on whether or not the physical document was successfully delivered.

If there's a software gap here, it's being filled as features in modern Point Of Sale systems. That space is really crowded right now (Revel, Clover, Toast, 'more modern' offerings from legacy providers like Micros and NCR). There may be an opportunity to provide a more niche offering rather than a comprehensive solution like those, but the space is far from empty.

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#63

Post by officelineback »

ovi256 wrote: post #6
bizzleDawg wrote: post #3

The shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product. Where are they still used at 'scale'?

Lawyers like faxes because it leaves a legally acknowledged written record on both sides, and they're instantaneous. So they send a lot of them. For some reason the fax is legally sounder than email.

I think a faxed signature counts as a "wet" signature. Also it's easier to sign then feed into a fax machine than:

- sign - scan (usually sent as a weird filename to your corporate email) - save the attachment, rename the file, create a new email, attach the file, send

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#64

Post by IgorPartola »

rabidonrails wrote: post #54
beaconstudios wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's amazing that phaxio have gotten away with such high prices for so long.

Phaxio founder here. Our pricing might seem higher (and may be in certain situations), but it works a bit differently that Twilio's. Twilio charges you the 1c _plus_ the costs of the call. Phaxio is an "all in" rate _including_ retrying the call. And, at Phaxio, if the calls all fail there's no cost to you. I'm not saying that we won't adjust our pricing (#competition), but there's a difference in the actual unit cos…

How long does it take to send a page of fax? Their pricing is 0.007 per minute. I haven't seen many fax machines take more than a minute per page, but they would have to take 10 minutes to catch up to your pricing.

Edit: Fixed time to comparable pricing.

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#65

Post by Artemis2 »

officelineback wrote: post #63
ovi256 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawyers like faxes because it leaves a legally acknowledged written record on both sides, and they're instantaneous. So they send a lot of them. For some reason the fax is legally sounder than email.

I think a faxed signature counts as a "wet" signature. Also it's easier to sign then feed into a fax machine than: - sign - scan (usually sent as a weird filename to your corporate email) - save the attachment, rename the file, create a new email, attach the file, send

That's why we have DocuSign!

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#66

Post by throwaway2016a »

coffeedoughnuts wrote: post #7

I just assumed from first glance that this was an early April Fools (I guess it must be April 1st in Australia by now) But after seeing full API docs... is this real? I'm so confused!

The API docs seem really elaborate for a April Fools joke. Plus if I sign into my account I can see all the new UI elements that talk about.

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#67

Post by toomuchtodo »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #51
robbiemitchell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the eFax providers have been doing this.

When your user-base is comprised of doctors, lawyers and blue-chip companies with ancient business processes you can get away with charging what you like.

And when your user base is developers without knowledge of the underlying fundamentals, you can charge how Twilio does. The knife, it cuts both ways.

Until you know the use case, pricing is a nebulous concept.

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#68

Post by carlosdp »

kevinburke wrote: post #2

This has been kicked around for a really long time and I'm happy they finally launched it. Around 2013 or so, one of the junior engineers on the Twilio Voice team pitched his innovation week project with a single slide saying "Fax: The time is now." The time has finally arrived! Congrats John.

Actually though! This has been an internal meme since then, there's been PRs for implementing it just hanging around for years =P I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't an April Fools joke.

Congrats Twilio!

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#69

Post by dangerboysteve »

scrollaway wrote: post #35
dangerboysteve wrote: post #27

now if they could implement barcode recognition for inbound faxes and plug into taskrouter they would have a very compelling offering.

Is there a reason why you can't do that yourself? It looks like you get image data access; plug in any old barcode reading library and you're golden.

You could easily add it yourself but it there could be other uses if they implement it. They could use the barcode data to add additional meta data to the fax file record. The meta data could then be used in task router.

Re: Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes

#70

Post by dangerboysteve »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #33
dangerboysteve wrote: post #27

now if they could implement barcode recognition for inbound faxes and plug into taskrouter they would have a very compelling offering.

What's the use case for barcode recognition? Sorry I've never had to use faxes much myself so I'm curious.

Some companies use the barcode value to route the fax to certain person or group or filing into a specific area. There are lots of industry specific applications.
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