Really? One per minute per number? That's a pretty big limitation.
Edit: I think Danielle just mistyped. From the FAQ: "Each of your Twilio SMS-enabled phone numbers can send SMS messages at a rate of 1 message per second. You can make requests to Twilio as fast as you like, and Twilio will queue the messages, releasing them at a rate of 1 message per second. It is not possible to adjust this rate."
Either way, imagine you need to send out 100 messages. That would be 100 seconds (or even worse 100 minutes.) Imagine if you needed to send out 1,000 or a million. Its going to be hard to build a solely SMS service around this based on that limitation. I think this is awesome if you want to add SMS alerts to your existing website or build a proof of concept, but I don't think your going to build an SMS app on top of this API.
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.
Edit: I think Danielle just mistyped. From the FAQ: "Each of your Twilio SMS-enabled phone numbers can send SMS messages at a rate of 1 message per second. You can make requests to Twilio as fast as you like, and Twilio will queue the messages, releasing them at a rate of 1 message per second. It is not possible to adjust this rate."