What's a good twilio alternative? Voximplant, plivio, bandwith are not very good.
Goodbye, Twilio
31–40 of 353 posts
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#32It seems the MBAs are at it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4 Twilio is now another Xerox. MBA programs should be illegal. You can thank MBAs for spreading PFAS everywhere, single use plastic, profiteering from insulin, making every American a diabetic by adding sugar into everything, selling glyphosate for residential use, killing all the pollinators, moving all manufacturing to countries with no en…
Alright fine. Twilio has largely saturated the communications space. You can now send an API request for a phone call, SMS message, and WhatsApp notification in a lot of countries. If you were calling the shots, what would your next growth move be? What should Twilio expand into?
Not spam-calling elderly people and causing them to fall and die could be a good start.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#33The really sad thing is the executive team / board / investors not being able to comprehend that they could vastly increase their revenue (and profit) by just providing expanded technical services to me (an existing customer). There are a ton of things I would pay Twilio for beyond SMS and WhatsApp Messaging. You don't need a MBA to figure that out, you just need someone talking to your customers and an engineering and product team that can turn that into real products.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#34Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…
The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.
This deplatforms a lot of legitimate transactional use cases and innovation. It's a horrible compromise.
I can't help but fear for what congress will do to neuter generative AI.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#35I feel like this isn’t the “betrayal” that it’s made out to be.
Twilio won at their niche. People often talk about “if we just get 1% of the market…” — is there a modern engineer on earth who hasn’t used Twilio’s API at least once?
They’re moving towards doing the same thing with other parts of tech companies, in this case it’s marketing. It’s not like their APIs change because of it, these are additional products they’re introducing. Engineers generally find anything marketing related icky, but they’re very happy to collect the checks which are funded through these icky distribution methodologies.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#36Thank you Miguel for all of your contributions to Twilio over the past four years, and I hope your next gig is just as rewarding!
For all those interested in why we acquired Segment, and are focused on the integration of data and communications -- several years ago, we came to the conclusion that the world doesn't need more communications, it needs better communications. More relevant. More effective.
As a developer, I know that's really hard to pull all the threads together to make realtime personalization of every communication hard -- and Segment is so good at it.
So that's what we're focused on!
As an aside, the fraud and scam vectors of email, sms, and voice have grown a lot since we started the company 15 years ago. We are always fighting that cat and mouse game with the bad folks of the world. Are we perfect, no. But are we here to make money off those bad actors? Hell no. That's why we just launched fraud guard [1] for free to all Verify customers, and soon to all SMS customers as well. More to come like this.
Happy Father's Day (in the US) HN!
[1] https://www.twilio.com/docs/verify/preventing-toll-fraud/sms...
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#37Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…
The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.
This is extremely frustrating for me. We used to use Send In Blue. If you send a campaign, and some larger percentage (10% or so) do not open within 24 hours, they automatically suspend your campaign.
On the surface you might think this is a good idea, but we used this service for sending investor updates. Most of our investors don’t open non-urgent emails within 24 hours. SIB claimed it was some legal requirement.
We switched to Gmass, which sort of hacks your Gmail account to send campaigns. We haven’t had any issue with Gmass blocking our campaigns, so I have doubts SIB was being genuine about the legal requirements.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#38Yeah, it's sad. They started as simply an SMS gateway. I still have a Twilio account, for my steampunk Teletype setup. It's a pure reply system - you text to a phone number, that's printed on a Teletype machine, and the sender gets an acknowledgement back. It's inbound SMS. Years ago, at Twilio's request, I demoed this at a Twilio convention. Twilio now wants me to "register my marketing campaign" and pay an addition…
The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.
I continue to receive an overwhelming amount of scam text messages and calls. These messages do not seem to originate from Twilio (probably because its high cost deterring scammers and spammers).
So all these the legal requirements intended to curb spam and scams, are clearly ineffective.
Even my Twilio phone number wasn't immune to incoming spam, and Twilio itself couldn't block it. I had to create a studio workflow to combat the issue. Indeed, it's a puzzling world...
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The campaign stuff is related to legal requirements. Ultimately the texting emailing and calling via APIs wild west is being shut down across the world by a hundred different government and regulatory organizations. Twilio surely has huge headaches in this area.
Good. The fact that the FCC refuses to act (and GOP in Congress blockades things like chair nominations (read up on what happened to Gigi Sohn) to ensure inaction) against telcos just allowing spammers to ruin our national communications infrastructure because the pennies they get from them are worth more than all their consumers is an embarrassment to our country.
Some of these requirements aren’t even from Twilio but from upstream, Tier 1 telcos.
T-Mobile for example has made many changes over the past few years intentionally designed to make it harder to onboard large numbers of texts, and they’re happy to tell intermediaries like Twilio to get fucked if they don’t play ball.
Which in absence of any stronger measures is great, but those stronger measures could at least serve to create a baseline that’s the same and reliable across the industry. If you want to launch a 10DLC-based campaign it can be a real headache.
Re: Goodbye, Twilio
#40The writing was on the wall when they got acquired, forced two-factor auth with SMS only and forcibly locked me out of my account by turning it on when I didn't have a phone setup. If you want to use SMS as spam prevention, then just do that. Breaking your product and forcing bad security to harvest numbers is, well, just shitty.
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