Provider Overview
As the leader in Cloud Communications Twilio powers over 28 billion calls and messages a year. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter use Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking to avoid the complex capacity planning and contract negotiations that come with global carrier relationships.
By connecting to Tier 1 carriers around the globe, Twilio can offer a high quality service with access to local phone numbers in over 70 countries. This way you only have to work with one provider for any VoIP or UC deployment. Twilio also gives you access to a wide range of other channels like SMS, chat, and video.
Twilio SIP Trunks are also unique in that they can be delivered over the public internet or through a range of private connectivity options including MPLS and colocation cross-connect.
Twilio Pricing and Services
While Twilio's services reach into a variety of markets, industries solutions and use-cases, the main services offered are broken down as follows:
- SIP Trunking - Twilio’s Elastic SIP Trunking is pay-as-you-go, where channel capacity automatically adjusts to your needs. Here is how it’s priced:
- Termination: $0.007/min for outbound calls
- Origination (Local Numbers): $1.00/mo per number. $0.0045 per min to receive calls.
- Origination (Toll Free Numbers): $2.00/mo per number. $0.00180/min to receive calls.
- Emergency Calling: $1.00/mo per number for E-911 Enabled numbers
- Call Recording: $0.0025/min, $0.0005/min per month for storage
- SRTP/TLS Encrypted Trunking: $0.001/min
- Voice and Video
- Local Connectivity: $1.00mo for numbers, $0.0085 per minute to receive, $0.013 per minute to place call
- Toll-Free Numbers: $2.00mo for numbers, $0.022 per minute to receive, $0.013 per minute to place call
- SIP Interface: $0.0040 per minute to receive, $0.0040 to place call
- Programmable Call Recording: $0.0025 per min for recording, $0.0005 per min/mo for Storage, $0.05/min for transcription
- Conference: $0.0018 per participant/min, $0.0025 per recording/min
- Answering Machine Detection: $0.0075 per call
- Programmable Voice Insights: $0.0040/min
- Messaging
- Local Connectivity: $1.00mo for numbers, $0.0075 to receive txt, $0.0075 to send txt ($0.01 receive pic, $0.02 to send)
- High-Volume SMS: $3kmo for numbers, $0.005 to receive short code txt, $0.01 to send ($0.01 receive pic, $0.02 send pic)
- Toll-Free Phone Numbers: $2.00/mo, $0.0075 to receive, $0.0075 to send
- Media Storage: First 5GB Free, $0.20 per GB over 5
Editor's Bottom Line of Twilio
Since their founding back in 2007, Twilio has always been a leader in their unique space. After going public in 2016, the provider continues to innovate and grow, more recently introducing their SIP Trunking offerings. Starting from a small group of three, Twilio has grown to a large developer community of over 1 million, not including Twilio employees. Twilio's mission is one of innovation, and is driven by the passion of building products that help empower users.
While Twilio is now known for their powerful SMS API platform, the provider's origins stem from Twilio Voice. This original API allowed users to place and receive phone calls hosted completely in the cloud. But just a few years later in February of 2010, the provider released their text messaging API. Without any slowing down, just a year later in July of 2011, Twilio went ahead and released SMS short codes in a public beta. Since 2009, Twilio had raised about $103 million in venture capital growth funding, but had went public in 2016 with a very successful launch.
Without even realizing it, many of us have already experienced Twilio's services. The popular group chat app, GroupMe, was founded in May 2010 specifically using Twilio's text messaging services. Other incredibly popular solutions that rely on Twilio's API platform include Netflix, AirBNB, Twitter, Salesforce, Twitch and both Uber and Lyft.
Uber provides one of the most obvious examples for how Twilio services can be utilized - when booking a trip on Uber, users will receive text messages to confirm their ride, and status updates on their driver's location. These text messages are only made possible through Twilio. Drivers are also able to directly contact riders through the Uber app, and even call passengers without ever knowing their phone number - this is all thanks to Twilio's APIs.
While a number of alternatives and competitors have popped up, Twilio remains the leading services in their some-what unique market, and continues to innovate with new offerings. Most recently, Twilio has introduced Elastic SIP Trunking.
