Twilio Analyzed
Overall Satisfaction with Twilio
At my organization, we use Twilio to send text message alerts to our subscribers. While the primary delivery channel for our content is via email, as a premium upsell feature we offer our same content sent as a text message as well. Many people currently prefer to receive alerts via SMS rather than email, so it's a nice perk for them.
Pros
- Sending the same text message to thousands of users. With Twilio's number pooling, you can use a "number pool" of regular phone numbers to round-robin send the same content to 1000s of users without getting blocked by the carriers.
- Great Ruby API, very easy to use and write unit tests for
- Call forwarding to your personal cellphone, to allow users to reach you (after going through an automated phone tree)
Cons
- Price is expensive. Twilio is the market leader and thus they charge more than their competitors. By far our most expensive SaaS service is Twilio.
- Support reps are not always helpful
- Documentation can be confusing at times
- Twilio has caused us to increase our conversion rate by approximately 3%
- Twilio has increased customer happiness and thus decreased our churn rate (not measured precisely)
- Twilio has made it faster to ship phone-related features, thus helping us keep our development efforts on-schedule
- Bandwidth
Bandwidth is 2/3 the price of Twilio for sending SMS messages. However, we decided to simply go with the market leader because it was the safer choice. At our scale, the increased developer effort outweighed the marginal increase in costs due to the per-SMS pricing differential. Overall we feel confident we made the right decision.
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