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Ask HN: Your preferred cloud API for voice/SMS and why?

9 points by varunkho ↗ HN
I stumbled upon this HN discussion of about 2 years old http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996970

Want to know fresh thoughts from people using different services recently?

Metrics are Price (including international calls), reliability, support/docs, and anything else you like about a service.

8 comments

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laurencei
Twilio. In my personal experience nothing comes close. Their API is awesome and I was up and running in literally minutes.
varunkho
I agree! But are they also better than others in terms of price and other features? I think price is the most crucial for telephony apps, provided reliability is not compromised.
taf2
Yes, you really also need to consider reliability - building an app for the phone and imagine the phones go out - your customers will not be happy, so for me twilio is definitely worth it. Also at scale twilio price is definitly more price competive then the smaller guys can offer... Additionally, queue is a huge feature that twilio offers - not sure the others offer that...
saarons
Plivo. I use it to provide voice/text services for my personal line and I couldn't be happier with them. I think the price is slightly cheaper than Twilio and you get a similar set of features. I've run into the occasional quirks here and there, but I've always been able to get great support right away.
rdl
Plivo. SIP.
johntdyer
Definitely biased here, since I work for Voxeo Labs, but Tropo is free for development, supports SIP, SMS, Shortcodes, TFN's ITFN's, ect. We also have great support ( 24/7 ) and fantastic documentation. Our product is also available on premise, should you want to go that route. It is also being deployed into many large carrier clouds, such as AT&T, Deutsch Telekom, ect.
mayel
At Babelverse, we first used Tropo's APIs to hack together a crisis-response tool - literally overnight - post-Japan earthquake & tsunami. We've been quite happy with it since then.
pla3rhat3r
twilio is the entire package. If you use OpenVBX along with twilio you can replace your phone system. And if you still want to hold onto your phone system you can use SIP out with twilio. Pretty soon they'll have SIP in as well.

Overall, twilio is more robust, more reliable, priced better, and more flexible. No one in the market even comes close. I've been doing telecom for over a decade and there's nothing better than twilio for telecommunications.