Plivo Rolls Out Free Trial Account that Lets You Do Voice Calls and SMS | Hacker News Reader

Plivo Rolls Out Free Trial Account that Lets You Do Voice Calls and SMS

plivo.com

37 pointsbevenky27 comments

Quick comment about the signup procedure; just finished the sign up and phone number verification, and I'm wondering why I have to enter the '+' in front of the country code and area code. Your signup form is smart enough to notice it's missing and let me know to enter it...so why isn't it smart enough to see that it's missing the leading '+' and just tack it on?

Reminds me a bit of entering a credit card number into a form, only to have the validation tell me that spaces aren't allowed.

We use Plivo at 7 Cups of Tea. They are great and I highly recommend them.

Thanks Glen for the kind words :)

Much appreciated :)

What made you decide to use Plivo over Twilio? Just curious.

This is great news, thanks guys!

Are there really no limitations on the number of calls and text messages? I imagine many businesses and other use cases could operate indefinitely with a single phone number and unlimited calls/texts, so what's preventing 10,000+ customers from never paying a cent, or even reselling your service to others?

@sparky You're correct, we are very aware of that risk, so we do have an algorithm in place to deter people from abusing the system. With that said, most users would not get to that limit with regular use while developing.

Does 'trial account' mean that it's free only for a limited duration?

Free trial is for life :)

Awesome! Thanks for this!

Anytime!

Very cool. Just been testing the SMS and text-to-speech API (via their node.js helper libraries) and it's working well.

Can I use the SMS API with this free trial?

Yes, you can definitely do that. However, the your caller ID will be that of the phone number assigned to you. Upgraded accounts will have the ability to customize their caller ID.

OK, is pricing the same for sending SMS with the trial? Sorry I'm having a hard time figuring out what is free.

the price for sending out an SMS is technically the same for the trial account, but you won't be paying for it :)

Wait, so I can use this API to send free SMS messages? The limitation is that I'm locked down to 1 phone #?

@tehwebguy Yes, that's right. We want you to use Plivo to the fullest.

This is a competitor to Twilio, yes?

Indeed we are in the same space as Twilio. However, we do have quite a number of differences. On the technical side, we have dedicated hardware for our media, which means that our call qualities are consistently great and drastically increases the number calls which can happen concurrently on our box. Our framework is also written on FreeSwitch, an open-source telephony platform. On the non-technical side offer 24/7 chat support at no extra cost and competitive pricing that just gets better with higher volumes. :)

Definitely like that you guys have your own hardware termination vs where Twilio is just terminating to Level3's gear.

Thanks for the confidence. We think that decoding/encoding of audio on dedicated hardware works best for call quality and we are really focussed on doing that.

What happens to the $10 credit developer accounts that was offered before?

Hi @chinmoy. It's DH from Plivo here.

Interesting question: your old Developer account actually had more limitations than the new Free Trial accounts. For example, you couldn't have made outbound voice calls to regular numbers via PSTN.

You can check out the full comparison here: http://plivo.com/faq/basics/whats-the-difference-between-fre...

No possibility of receiving SMS?

Hi, yes you can. You need to append a 'message url' to your Plivo app:

check out the message section at http://plivo.com/docs/xml/request/

Oh ok, its just not very clear unlike twilio

edit: those api docs are as clear as mud, no example on how to receive an SMS

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