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by christo16 5311 days ago
It's a good service, but unless they bring prices way down, some big provider (Cough Amazon..) is going to come in and eat their lunch. Granted they probably wouldn't offer the level of detailed APIs that Twillio does.

We started using them for SMS sending but went with Nexmo at a fraction of the cost.

2 comments

I believe their exit strategy is to be acquired by Amazon or someone of their scale. They drive their entire platform on Amazon AWS and the Rackspace cloud system, and Jeff (one of the Twilio co-founders) was previously the product manager for AWS.

I went to both Twiliocon and interviewed with Twilio. They're very smart guys, but the problem is that its a race to the bottom. Their idea is innovative (webapps <-> telco integration), but anyone can do it once they learn how to handle the SMS messages between the web and the carrier gateways, as well as how to handle call flows with Asterisk or Freeswitch.

Also, to me, it appears they're swimming upstream. Everyone else is moving towards unlimited voice/sms, while they're trying to stick to per minute/per sms rates (even for their VoIP offering!).

Awesome idea, excellent execution, not a long term business model.

How is Nexmo compared to Tropo?