Why choose Tropo over Twilio

We don't provide a complete self-service setup process yet We are working on that. Just apply for the free trial and we'll help you bootstrap the whole thing.

--Dominique (Nu Echo's CTO)

Whether you charged developers or not, at some point you charged someone for something.

While free dev accounts are great, I'm still not going to learn a tool and recommend it to clients without knowing if it's something that they can actually afford. Twilio has made it known from day 1 what the pricing is - whether people liked it or not is a different matter! :)

Fortunately it's easier to simplify features than to add new ones.

Possibly in tropo's case it may be. That's not always the case - I would say not even usually the case with software. Witness MSOffice - much easier to add new features than to simplify the interface. The 'ribbon' effort pissed off as many people as it helped. :) Don't give us a tropo 'ribbon' equivalent please!

I am writing this to provide context, not to disagree with you...

Relatively speaking, Voxeo was as cheap 10 years ago as Twilio and Tropo are today.

Everything about this business was more expensive 10 years ago though. The cost of bulk long distance was 8x higher, server costs were about 10x more, bandwidth cost about 10x, server hosting (nothing like EC2 existed) was about 3x more... all costs were much higher then they are today. However, Voxeo's pricing 10 years ago was much lower than every other option available. It was very disruptive.

We did market to reach people like you, that's why we have over 200,000 members in the Voxeo developer community today. And that community is growing faster than it ever has. We clearly didn't reach everyone though.

We have many customers with 100+ employees that started off as 2-3 guys and an idea 10 years ago. The developer focus worked and is the cornerstone of our business. It's how we became the largest platform in the world for telephony apps.

In short the service absolutely was for indie devs, 2-3 man shops and start ups. We had no idea how to sell to large enterprises and service providers back then. It wasn't our DNA. We are developers. I'm a developer. We built it for developers. It was entirely about developers ;)

We took a different approach though. We focused on making standards. We hate lock-in. We hate proprietary. That's why Tropo is an open-source platform. We hate the country-club mentality that you find from legacy vendors like Avaya and Alcatel.

So we lead both the W3C VoiceXML and CCXML standards. Along the way those standards got massive adoption in the enterprise and service provider markets, and the resulting large opportunities pulled us in that direction. We continued to focus on developers, just not at the 100% level we used to.

We created Voxeo Labs to have a new team that focuses 100% on developers. Not to try to "create" a developer focus, but to refine the focus we have always had. That effort is working out great. Like some of the posts here point out, we have our own rabid developers. And we're very quickly getting better at building the fanbase you mention.

Our biggest challenge when it comes to focused simplicity is what we know. We've lived through all the little features and gotchas that need to be addressed as developers scale from the small projects to the larger needs you mention.

When we built Tropo, we included things in it to address those needs and get past those gotchas. We couldn't help ourselves :) The problem is we're solving problems developers don't even know they'll have yet. The end result looks more complex... until it's exactly what you need.

To wrap up, I've never suggested it's just marketing/evangelism. It is also, as you point out, a focused simplicity. We've got some great improvements coming to improve our simplicity while we also continue to provide answers to the feature requirements and challenges we know developers will hit as they scale.

Btw I also hate the webapi vs scripting issue, and I let the Voxeo Labs team know that almost every week ;)

So what else can we do to improve our developer focus and bild that fanbase? How can we get better?

Our Mirador IVR application monitoring service is exactly what you are looking for. It is one thing to regularly call a given number - which can indeed be hacked quite easily using either Tropo, Asterisk, etc, it is another thing to send daily, weekly, monthly and yearly report to reflect the actual state of the IVR application over time. Call setup time? Greeting time? Transaction failure? Call setup failure? Moreover, you probably want to get an email or SMS notification whenever a defect occurs (otherwise, what's the point of monitoring?) Plus, you probably also happen to want to get a notification for the alarm restore right? While we are at it, I am sure you want those reports available online in a secure location or as a PDF document.

You get all this with Mirador!

I have received your request this morning through our website and you should have received my reply by now ;-)

Thanks Adam,

That is surely yet another point in favor of Tropo. They test. Using our NuBot Platform, we have load test their infrastructure with several concurrent calls. A few issues came up and Voxeo promptly fixed the issues. Case closed. Tremendous support.

I don't know about Twilio in such regard. A few months back, I have offered Twilio our load testing services but I haven't heard of them so far. Danielle, Jeff, if you read this, drop me a note (pdeschen @ nuecho dot com) and we'll be pleased to load test your infra! :-)

Pascal