There are many Twilio competitors and there have been for a while now. However, Twilio has been really resilient in terms of keeping their high growth year over year. What is the reason for that?
Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
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Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#22I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
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Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#23Plivo is another Twilio competitor for voice and sms. Been using it for a while for mostly US sms, works fine: https://www.plivo.com/
Which, if any, of these Twilio competitors will allow me to CC: a SMS to an email address without involving third party providers ?
I have begged Twilio engineers in person at multiple Signal and over email/support channels as well as the CEO and here in this very forum: For the Love Of God will you please add an 'email' twiml verb ?
If you want to CC: a SMS to email currently, within Twilio, you need to build functions, sign up for a Sendgrid account, authenticate in sendgrid with real names and physical addresses ...
It's a no-brainer use-case and it is nothing but pain to implement.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#24I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
At one of the early TwilioCons (second, I think?) we had a competitor set up in front giving away coffee and donuts. It was amusing and showed how desperate they were. If you're targeting competitors' customers after they've spent the time, money, and effort to come to a conference, they're probably not a good prospect. They're deep and unlikely to switch easily or quickly. There are much better targets elsewhere. *…
That's not desperation, that's literally sales.
Twilio and MessageBird have the same customer. Someone who is using Twilio could reasonably convert faster than someone who doesn't use any api-based telephony integration. You skip the step of convincing internal teams that you should do this in the first place.
At ZenPayroll we didn't just ignore people on ADP, Paychex, Intuit, etc. That would be nuts!
If you're trying to reach "people who integrate with telephony APIs" the Twilio conference is…the perfect place to find them!
re: spending time/money/effort to come to conferences:
1) They are networking events.
2) They are paid for by companies so employees aren't by default that invested.
3) It's not a lot of effort. Employees like going to conferences. You meet people. It's paid for. You don't really have to do anything. It's a workation for most.
As for retention, much of Twilio is mostly a commodity. MessageBird came to the US and started a price war, which is really what you're competing on. Switching SMS APIs isn't the same as, say, switching off of SalesForce.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#25I've been a happy customer for years. Their services work well. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said (anymore) about their dashboard. Slow, unreliable, buggy... I got really close to trying Twilio this time. It concerns me when companies want to grow faster when it seems they are having problems with having grown too fast already.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#26Is there a Twilio competitor for which per-minute rates to Belarus aren't ~ $0.50 USD? I remember purchasing "calling cards" in the 90s at convenience stores with better rates.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#27I remember when MessageBird was giving away free tacos across the street from Twilio's Signal conference. Left me feeling that their brand is tacky and desperate. On the other hand, I learned that there was an alternative to Twilio. And got free tacos.
Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option. Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America. This is…
SignalWire is also a Twilio competitor. Their SMS pricing is much, much cheaper and they have cloned the Twilio APIs. I am not affiliated with them, other than as a customer of both Twilio and SignalWire at different times (small dev accounts.)
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not a usual startup?
Special terms. They already did a few million rev.
I don't know anything about the terms or whatever, but we were in the same batch. It was really funny with the whole batch practicing for Demo Day giving revenue numbers, growth rate, etc. We had in tens of thousands of dollars per month in MRR, which was on the higher end.
MessageBird, as you said, came to the US already with a _well_ established business. Obviously they weren't competing for the same investors/checks as most of the rest of the batch, but it was still hilarious to hear them pitch next to everyone else.
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like an inoffensive way to get your name out to devs and/or decision makers who largely think Twilio is the only option. Twilio resells commodity product (SIP/SMS) at Saas margins by offering good developer experience and - by this point - major brand recognition. It’s not a defensible business long term, they just had a huge head start, and they still compete terribly for service outside North America. This is…
SignalWire is also a Twilio competitor. Their SMS pricing is much, much cheaper and they have cloned the Twilio APIs. I am not affiliated with them, other than as a customer of both Twilio and SignalWire at different times (small dev accounts.) https://signalwire.com/pricing/messaging
Off top I know of
Messagebird, Plivo, Nexmo (part of Vonage), Telnyx, Voxbone, Signalwire
Re: Twilio’s Dutch rival MessageBird plans an IPO
#30I've been a happy customer for years. Their services work well. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said (anymore) about their dashboard. Slow, unreliable, buggy... I got really close to trying Twilio this time. It concerns me when companies want to grow faster when it seems they are having problems with having grown too fast already.
I've had the exact opposite experience.
I don't know how many 200 OK I've received but the message was never delivered (and soooo many times during vital demos). I had several support cases with them and they simply ignored me. My product is built around SMS so I could have been easy money for them if it actually worked reliably.
I ditched them for Twilio, never had any issues since then. A couple of months later someone from sales at MessageBird reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked if I wanted to try their service. Spilled my guts to him and he wasn't surprised...
How certain are you that your messages are delivered? When I started digging, it was scary how often it failed successfully.