They retain the right to any/all the upside of any risk/scale, and you retain the obligation in any downside. No questions.
It's despicable.
I did as well.
In fact, I built my own little personal telco around their services and API.
It is all slowly falling apart, however, as their failure to build out their infrastructure offerings (as opposed to their "customer engagement" offerings) and the regulatory SNAFUs[1][2] that are emerging as a result of their behavior erode all of my use-cases ...
All I wanted was more, and more useful, twiml verbs ... instead I got "customer engagement workflows".
[1] https://twitter.com/rsyncnet/status/1593384850073214976
[2] 10DLC A2P makes personal/hobbyist Twilio usage basically impossible (although mine continue to work ...)
I was a HUGE Twilio booster back in the day. I encouraged its use heavily in my very large org because it was so much better than our entrenched phone provider. I was (maybe still am) featured on their website. But things have just gotten more..business-y, less developer focused, just..generally worse.
I don't know what to do with these guys anymore. I understand they're trying to grapple with the mess of regulations that got dumped on them, but their messaging and support around all this is BAD. There's no answers, just walls of canned text.
I work with Twilio a lot and kind of agree with your last sentence but what do you mean? Are these normal business practices?
There's a very obvious pattern on the spectrum of | Asset -> Liability |, and sadly, time proves they're much closer to a liability than an asset.
Over time, tech becomes a tax.
Or, more accurately, that they have become normal, rather than being objectively normal.
Most "alternative" SMS services a simply a façade built on top of Twilio, with the markup to prove it.
While they are mostly known in Asia but they offer service in Europe/North America as well.
We have a full messaging + voice + video APIs, including a Twilio-compatible API just for people who need to switch. We're backed by companies like Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, and Samsung so we know how to make telecom infra!
https://signalwire.com/products/cloud-messaging
We're also the folks behind the open-source FreeSWITCH framework that powers companies like Bandwidth, Five9, Dialpad, Zoom Voice... maybe even your own company's PBX!
Thanks
Do you have a god-damned email verb for twiml ?
I mean, seriously. Twilio could allow (verified-ownership emails only) for the simplest possible email integration into twiml for the sole purpose of alerting and paging, etc.
No spam possible since it's only verified account-controlled emails. Basically sending email to yourself from within twiml.
But no. Instead they bought sendgrid and email integration is a complete abomination of a two-company, two platform, two accounts workflow that is fragile and fails all the time.
So ... do you ?
Just FYI SendGrid is a Twilio product LOL, so I guess you are right.