Today we're excited to announce the launch of our newest product: Twilio SMS.
Existing customers already know you can use Twilio to make and receive phone calls, and now you can also send and receive text messages from your Twilio phone numbers! Starting today, all local Twilio phone numbers are SMS enabled, allowing you to write SMS applications as easily as you can write voice apps on Twilio.
We're
ridiculously excited about Twilio SMS. Previously, building SMS apps
was hard... it could take months of negotiations, approvals, and
hundreds or thousands of dollars up-front and every month to get
started. With Twilio SMS, it's as easy as buying a Twilio phone number
from the Twilio account portal or Phone Numbers REST API for $1 / month, and immediately start receiving and sending text messages using Twilio's SMS REST API for just 3 cents per message. No waiting period, no contracts, no hefty up-front costs... just $1 and your imagination.
Also,
Twilio SMS is fully integrated into Twilio's voice functionality. Need
to send an SMS from inside a phone call? Just drop our newest TwiML verb in there: <Sms>
and Twilio will send a text message to the caller with whatever content
you specify.
For example: <Sms>Our hours are 9-5</Sms>
Get Started with Twilio SMS
Are you ready to explore the power of Twilio SMS? It's incredibly simple to start adding text messaging to your existing Twilio applications and web applications, and we've got the tools to help you get started:
- Introduction to Twilio SMS
- Twilio SMS Quickstart
- How To: SMS Notifications & Alerts
- REST API: SMS Documentation
- TwiML SMS Documentation
Customer Story: Salesforce.com
DreamForce 2009 was the biggest Salesforce conference yet, and when Salesforce.com needed to allow the 19,000 attendees to vote for the "Best in Show" Appy Award, they turned to Twilio SMS.
Their app received and tallied votes from the participants and responded in realtime with SMS confirmations. With Twilio SMS and the Force.com platform, Salesforce developers only needed a few hours to build an app that scaled to Dreamforce-proportions.
Read about how Salesforce used Twilio SMS at Dreamforce >>Phone Number Price Reduction
We're
also happy to announce that we are now able to lower the prices on all
Twilio phone numbers.
Starting today, all local numbers are $1 per month, and all toll free numbers are $2 per month. By aggregating the demand of many applications, we're able to lower costs for all Twilio customers... and now we're excited to see what applications are enabled by these improved phone number economics. The new pricing is automatically applied to your Twilio account, and you'll be charged the new prices next time your phone numbers renew.
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Congrats guys! This is great news. I can't wait to get started using this!
Posted by: John Sheehan | February 09, 2010 at 07:55 AM
Any possibility of doing charge backs like carriers do? For example, I want to build an app to make it easy to collect donations for charities, like "text haiti to 90999" to make a $10 donation to Red Cross.
Posted by: Deece | February 09, 2010 at 08:22 AM
Great - I look forward to useing it.. Oh right, you are a bunch of nationalists who won't anybody but Americans play with this stuff.
Go fuck yourself
Posted by: Tommy | February 09, 2010 at 10:53 AM
Can you handle large bursts of activity, which might seem borderline DOS-ish? E.g. 3000 votes in 1 min. I'm not asking this question just to ask. I have a real use for this, if it's possible.
Posted by: alan | February 09, 2010 at 04:45 PM
John - thanks!
Re: charge backs. Definitely a popular request we're considering, a very quick and easy way to defray the cost of the message and make money.
Angry international guy - we're working on it, stay tuned... and take 'er easy.
Re: high volume - that's what Twilio is built for, but keep in mind that outgoing messages are rate limited to 1 message per second per phone number. There is no limit on incoming messages.
Let us know if we can answer any more questions here in the comments, or by emailing help@twilio.com
Posted by: Danielle Morrill | February 10, 2010 at 11:50 AM
It's looking very promising Danielle for our planned use case and looking forward to seeing more this week.
Posted by: twitter.com/cncpartners | February 10, 2010 at 11:28 PM
This looks good.
Posted by: David Jacobs | February 11, 2010 at 06:25 PM
Great
Posted by: Arshad Malik | July 10, 2010 at 05:33 AM
Awesome News.
Great work.
Posted by: jignesh | July 11, 2010 at 12:47 AM
I've been putting together a proof of concept for http://www.JabberText.com using a trial account and so far its working very well, this seems to be exactly what we have been looking for for a long time but couldn't find an SMS provider that had this level of service for such a reasonable price. This will allow us to expand our service offerings. Great Job!!
Posted by: Mike Penn | July 25, 2010 at 08:49 AM
I will have to see some others in action before jumping on this one. But, the pricing is really great as compared to some others that I have been researching. Looks very promising.
Posted by: dan | July 27, 2010 at 06:51 AM