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Programmable Fax – API for sending and receiving faxes
- kevinburke 10y agoThis has been kicked around for a really long time and I'm happy they finally launched it. Around 2013 or so, one of the junior engineers on the Twilio Voice team pitched his innovation week project with a single slide saying "Fax: The time is now." The time has finally arrived! Congrats John.
- tyingq 10y agoGuessing this will kill Phaxio. Compare the pricing: https://www.twilio.com/fax/pricing https://www.twilio.com/fax/pricing https://www.phaxio.com/pricing/ https://www.phaxio.com/pricing/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- beaconstudios 10y agoit's amazing that phaxio have gotten away with such high prices for so long.
- robbiemitchell 10y agoAll the eFax providers have been doing this.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoWhen your user-base is comprised of doctors, lawyers and blue-chip companies with ancient business processes you can get away with charging what you like.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoAnd when your user base is developers without knowledge of the underlying fundamentals, you can charge how Twilio does. The knife, it cuts both ways. Until you know the use case, pricing is a nebulous concept.
- rory096 10y agoI'm not sure the Phaxio pricing is all that much higher than Twilio. They're covering failed faxes, cancelled faxes, faxes that require multiple retries, and faxes that just take a long time — only charging per page delivered. Those will all eat up minutes that you'll pay for with Twilio. In any case, their pricing model has been far preferable to their old competitor, Interfax: https://www.interfax.net/en/prices https://www.interfax.net/en/prices
- kelnos 10y agoWe (Twilio) are also only charging for successful delivery. Failures to not incur any billing. Retry is (currently) on the customer to implement, but since we don't charge for failures, that doesn't affect cost. Yes, we're charging per-minute fees, but for US, at least, it's sub-1-cent, and with my testing so far, I haven't seen it go more than a couple minutes per page for something fairly complex, and that's worst case.
- tyingq 10y agoSomeone else in this business says they see 1 minute for 1 page faxes, but faster for longer faxes...Because the first page has the initial handshake. http://www.faxage.com/learn_faxing_by_minutes_versus_faxing_by_pages.php http://www.faxage.com/learn_faxing_by_minutes_versus_faxing_... I'm sure some pages take longer, but it doesn't seem odd that most pages aren't complex.
- rabidonrails 10y agoPhaxio founder here. Our pricing might seem higher (and may be in certain situations), but it works a bit differently that Twilio's. Twilio charges you the 1c _plus_ the costs of the call. Phaxio is an "all in" rate _including_ retrying the call. And, at Phaxio, if the calls all fail there's no cost to you. I'm not saying that we won't adjust our pricing (#competition), but there's a difference in the actual unit cost.
- tyingq 10y agoHow long does it take, on average, to send a page?
- IgorPartola 10y agoHow long does it take to send a page of fax? Their pricing is 0.007 per minute. I haven't seen many fax machines take more than a minute per page, but they would have to take 10 minutes to catch up to your pricing. Edit: Fixed time to comparable pricing.
- rabidonrails 10y agoQuick answer is that it depends on what's on the page. It can be as quick as a minute or significantly longer if there are images or lots of data the page.
- IgorPartola 10y agoThat's fair but how many pages take more than 10 minutes?
- kelnos 10y agoI'd be surprised to see more than a couple minutes for even a complicated fax page. I've seen 45-70 seconds average for a not-too-complicated page. It also depends on the baud rate (never thought that term would come back, eh?) negotiated between both ends. A 14400 baud transmission will of course be faster than 9600.
- nck4222 10y agoAfter reading these arguments I was expecting something in the range of dollars per fax. Is 7 cents per page really that much? I'm not very knowledgeable about this stuff, but are there really that many places out there faxing thousands of pages where 7 cents per page vs 5 cents per page is really going to make a difference for them?
- tyingq 10y agoThere isn't consensus on the 5 cents per page part. Some think it is closer to 3. If that's true, generally, I'm concerned if a competitor launches at less than half my price. Even if it is 5 cents, that's a 30% discount, which seems significant.
- dublidu 10y agoIt makes a difference at high volumes.
- kevinburke 10y agoRumors of the demise of telecom services based on their competitors' feature set and pricing are greatly exaggerated. https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comments-about-twilio/ https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/six-years-of-hacker-news-comme...
- tyingq 10y agoThis is a smaller, more niche market though. Not just the "fax" or "online fax", but specifically "fax API" slice. There are not many players.
- Thieum22 10y agoSome of our customers have been using foiply : https://www.foiply.com/pricing-monthly/ https://www.foiply.com/pricing-monthly/ The difference in pricing will certainly make them consider a switch.
- carlosdp 10y agoActually though! This has been an internal meme since then, there's been PRs for implementing it just hanging around for years =P I had to check the date to make sure it wasn't an April Fools joke. Congrats Twilio!
- kelnos 10y agoDepends on what time zone you're in ;)
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- jenamety 10y agoI have previously integrated with eFax in 2010, so an internet fax provider is not new to me, but forgive my ignorance as I haven't visited the space in a while. Which innovation are you excited about and referring to? From the comments it seems to be 'developer friendly API' or 'Simplicity in pricing' as the to big draws, just curious what has changed since my last days?
- pyre 10y agoBeing "developer-friendly" can be a big draw. Take Stripe for example. It's an HTTP API with bindings in a number of languages. Previously I worked with a payment processor that required we run some sort of Java application even though we weren't a Java shop. Someone had to setup a way to wrap the Java application to interface with the payment processor (not even getting into the issue that now we have to deal with running a JVM-based application). Some companies are actively developer hostile in their interfaces.
- briankwest 10y agoOr download FreeSWITCH and roll your own. :)
- bizzleDawg 10y agoThe shocking thing about this is that there must still be enough Faxes being sent to actually justify this new product. Where are they still used at 'scale'?
- kevinburke 10y agoJapan, for one, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine-is-anything-but-a-relic.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fa...
- kelnos 10y agoAnd Germany. Also fax is apparently the only way to reserve a table for Oktoberfest in Munich. Or so says a German colleague.
- patrickread 10y agoHealth care and dental care providers tend to still like faxes. It's still a thing, unfortunately.
- ovi256 10y agoLawyers like faxes because it leaves a legally acknowledged written record on both sides, and they're instantaneous. So they send a lot of them. For some reason the fax is legally sounder than email.
- officelineback 10y agoI think a faxed signature counts as a "wet" signature. Also it's easier to sign then feed into a fax machine than: - sign - scan (usually sent as a weird filename to your corporate email) - save the attachment, rename the file, create a new email, attach the file, send
- Artemis2 10y agoThat's why we have DocuSign!
- coffeedoughnuts 10y agoI just assumed from first glance that this was an early April Fools (I guess it must be April 1st in Australia by now) But after seeing full API docs... is this real? I'm so confused!
- jonmarkgo 10y agoWhy not both?
- tommynicholas 10y agoThere is a TON of faxing still going on
- bshimmin 10y agoIt seems like it actually isn't, though this was my first thought too: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/31/twilio-now-lets-developers-send-faxes/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/31/twilio-now-lets-developers... (I'm glad 1st April is a Saturday this year so I can mostly not be near a computer for it to avoid the intensely twee irritation of it all.)
- throwaway2016a 10y agoThe API docs seem really elaborate for a April Fools joke. Plus if I sign into my account I can see all the new UI elements that talk about.
- fragmede 10y agoA corollary from William Gibson's famous quote, "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.", is that just because you're living in the future where you, and all your friends have smartphones, doesn't mean that everyone does. In fact, there are huge swaths of people that don't even have broadband Internet access, even in the US, even using the FCC's antiquated definition of broadband of 2 Megabit. Meanwhile, I can get 20 Mbit with my cellphone on 4G LTE on a good day. Be careful when extrapolating from things you don't use because it doesn't necessarily follow that others don't.
- sorenjan 10y agoI'm guessing it's an American thing. I think they still use checks too.
- brightball 10y agoOh thank goodness! I've been waiting for this. Been looking for a quality alternative to efax for my wife and now I can build one for about 1/10th of the ongoing cost.
- koolba 10y agoThis is pretty neat. From the API docs it looks like they've really reduced it down to, "Here's a PDF, send this to number XYZ". Here's a fun side project for somebody: Make a network tunnel that uses faxes as a way to send packets back and forth. You can encode the packets as a QR code, ship it over via fax, and then reply back with another fax. Be cool to see that in action with a human doing the receipt / transport vs. a fully automated one (two computers using Twilio API).
- pg_bot 10y agoIf Twilio will sign a business associates agreement, this could be huge in the healthcare field. EMRs have terrible interoperability so doctors and health systems typically fax health records to one another. However, this service does not look HIPAA compliant based on the sparse documentation. It doesn't look promising that they will sign a BAA according to this document. https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223136467-Ensuring-HIPAA-compliancy-with-Twilio-made-applications https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223136467-Ensur...
- tdeschamps 10y agoThey might have not considered this to be a big enough business opportunity when they penned this section.
- viggity 10y agoI'm in healthcare. I'm not kidding you, we got an 800 page fax last month from one of our clients. It wasn't a generated e-fax either, we received it electronically (we use sfax), but the lady who sent it literally printed 800 pages and put them on her fax machine. It isn't the business opportunity that is the problem (that is huge), it is the all of the HIPAA/HITECH regulations which creep into every part of your business that is the limiting factor.
- Edmond 10y agocan you elaborate on the HIPAA concerns related to faxing/transmitting health data? Faxing is a transport service... is the concern around security and privacy while en route from the API to the destination? If there was a way to facilitate that transfer without compromising privacy or security en route would that address HIPAA concerns? We've developed a privacy preserving trust relay protocol which might be applicable to use cases like this that's why I am asking: https://www.cipheredtrust.com/ https://www.cipheredtrust.com/
- Johnny555 10y ago
- dangerboysteve 10y agonow if they could implement barcode recognition for inbound faxes and plug into taskrouter they would have a very compelling offering.
- Karrot_Kream 10y agoWhat's the use case for barcode recognition? Sorry I've never had to use faxes much myself so I'm curious.
- troyastorino 10y agoFor us — we send out requests for medical records to doctors' offices. When doctors send records back to us, they usually include the cover sheet we sent over. Since that cover sheet has a barcode on it, we know which record request the incoming records are for.
- Roboprog 10y agoSame. At work we are in the process of rewriting an application that sends FAXes to doctors for their signatures. The barcode is on the edge of the doc, rather than the coverpage, but otherwise, same. The barcode is used as less error prone OCR for a record number so the FAX can be associated with the right "file". The users requesting the FAX loop view the returned document when it comes back to verify it (or at least, they will, when I finish recreating that feature :-) ). HOWEVER, users DO NOT sift through all incoming documents with data for other people which is none of a given user's business. Having to do so would be not only an inconvenience, but a data privacy issue. Plus, I would rather somebody else build doc ID OCR in a language other than Java so I don't have to build it myself. This is going to come up time and time again.
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- tommynicholas 10y agoCame up with a use case for this within our current product within 30 seconds of seeing this, love it!
- troyastorino 10y agoAnyone see anything about how they handle simultaneous incoming faxes to the same number? With other faxing APIs we've used, if we get a new inbound fax while another is being received, the second (new) inbound fax will get a busy signal and not get procewsed. Phaxio has said they can handle any number of simultaneous inbound faxes, but we haven't had a chance to try them yet. It would be nice to know if Twilio is an option.
- kelnos 10y agoMultiple simultaneous incoming is fine. They'll all get received properly.
- theLearningChan 10y agoHOW WOULD YOU KNOW! /s
- faxman 10y agoAny reasonable fax service provider will allow reception of multiple faxes concurrently. Some might deliberately limit the number of concurrent connections so that one client's activity doesn't kill their other clients, but even that sort of throttling would in practice be a very rare event.
- yarper 10y agoTime to connect this up to twitter firehose, we can finally fax all the tweets
- travelton 10y agoThis is neat! But I have to expose the PDF to the internet for Twilio to pick up the file and send it? https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/fax/quickstart#send-a-fax https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/fax/quickstart#send-a-fax
- caust1c 10y agoCertainly you can attach a token and firewall all but twilio's servers if you're serious about using this service. I don't see the problem with it.
- j_s 10y agohttps://www.twilio.com/docs/api/security#validating-requests https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/security#validating-requests Twilio cryptographically signs its requests Not sure on the specifics of a GET vs the normal POST callbacks but they definitely are aware this is an issue.
- viggity 10y agoI'd be surprised if it wasn't similar to (or exactly like) their POST auth. They concatenate the URL, the post variables (alphabetically sorted) and your twilio account id and hash it with your auth key. They put that hash into an auth header on the post. I had to dig into it because we had a reverse proxy in front of our app and the hash generated by their client .net library was understandably different than what they sent because the domains were ultimately different.
- apeace 10y agoIf anyone's first reaction was along the lines of: "Faxing in 2017?" or "Is this an April Fool's joke?", consider that the healthcare industry still uses faxes frequently. I once interviewed at a company that was building software for ordering durable medical equipment in hospitals. They told me that all orders were faxed to the insurance companies, and the error rate for copying data to the faxed form was about 90%. This results in repeated fax transmissions and patients waiting days to know whether their insurance company will buy them a wheelchair. Using an API like this, you can at least digitize one end of the process, error-free, and still deliver the expected fax to the other side which hasn't upgraded yet.
- iamatworknow 10y agoA lot of the personal financing industry still does too, particularly for car loans. There are some web solutions but they always involve some third party service that both the car dealership and bank has to sign up (and pay) for.
- Roboprog 10y agoNo :-) My first reaction was "I have to rewrite one of these in a week or two, is this API easier/cheaper to use than our current vendor?" I suppose if this post had come up a few months earlier or later, I would not have cared so much. But today, I'm all over it.
- Roboprog 10y agoHere's how it looks like it works to me: (their stuff is of course HTTPS, and I'm assuming the caller's support links would be as well. Each REST call also has authentication tokens, of course) === Out: === You POST data to their REST resource, including a link to your PDF document, which they pull (as well as phone number data). Presumably, you want to add some kind of temporary security token/nonce to the link that you give them. Twilio uses the link to pull your PDF, and sends it to the previously indicated number. === In: === You GET a list of FAX doc IDs. I don't see query parameters for date ranges and/or phone numbers, but presumably you can do so. You GET the metadata for a FAX ID obtained from the previous list. This includes a temporary link for the image data. You GET the image data from the indicated "authenticating" temporary link. It's unclear what the format is (accept headers???), but it's likely PDF only. === What seems to be missing in this process is a way to associate an inbound FAX with an outbound FAX (e.g. - barcode or other built in OCR index value). This is needed so that you can support "sign this and send it back" workflows. The phone number is not enough: many docs could go to the same phone number, and the remote signer could send the FAX back from any number, anyway.
- Roboprog 10y agoI have to rebuild one of these in a week or two, so it is VERY MUCH an item of interest to me to support the "sign and send back" workflow.
- hughes 10y agoAre document-specific replies part of current manual faxing technology? This seems like something that would depend on your own internal document management rather than the fax protocol itself.
- Roboprog 10y agoOur current vendor supports this. There is a barcode (or on older stuff, just digits) in a "window" on the document which the system OCRs and uses to index incoming documents. This allows the incoming (returning) docs to be routed back into a workflow for the right user. Important due to volume and data privacy issues.
- homero 10y agoI would love to buy an app that uses this. Faxitnice stole my money
- sjclemmy 10y agoFax. Aaaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhh.
- jnankin 10y agoTwilio and Phaxio just had a fax based conversation live on youtube https://ibb.co/ksStrF https://ibb.co/ksStrF https://ibb.co/fUFDrF https://ibb.co/fUFDrF
- kwhitefoot 10y agoI think the last time I sent a fax must have been more than ten years ago. How is sending a fax better than emailing the document file or a scan of the document if it was already on paper? As for doctors using faxes,that sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. I live in Norway, all the health records are online so my GP and any hospital in the country can see my records (if I give consent), prescriptions are electronic and paperless, etc. I still get snail mail letters from the health system but that is simply because I have not got around to applying for a secure email account (the state gently reminds me now and again).
- rsync 10y agoUgh. How can it be possible that my favorite technology service in 2017 is perpetuating something that absolutely must die ? Common decency dictates that we must do everything possible to make faxing as hard as possible. When someone asks you to fax something, pretend you have no idea what they're talking about. Then ridicule them.
- cordite 10y agoNot everyone that demands a fax wants it through fax. Making someone's job harder socially won't get a business, organization, or agency to change their ways. If you want places like healthcare to stop using faxes, propose a secure solution that meets their needs and fulfills government requirements / restrictions.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y agoWTF? "Programmable Fax" - as if fax was somehow not accessible to computers before twilio invented a proprietary API for it. Yes, it was, believe it or not: You can indeed send faxes from software, via a fax modem connected to a landline, or an ISDN TA connected to an ISDN line, via a GSM MT connected to a GSM network ... Or, if you like your internet and don't want to deal with older communications networks directly, there even is a frickin non-proprietary API for it that was standardised nearly two decades ago: T.37 and T.38. And there have been companies offering gateway services that allow you to send faxes to the PSTN using those APIs for about as long.
- fapjacks 10y agoI am interested in how this works on the back end, and whether or not they're using t.38. And if they're using t.38, how reliable this service is. As someone that played with -- nay, engineered -- a faxing solution over a couple of years' worth of side project time in order to facilitate playing an ARG, I can say confidently that faxing over VOIP lines ("t.38") is almost impossible to do reliably.
- bankster 10y agoTons of great information on this thread. The idea that in the year 2017 we are transmitting sensitive data at modem speed technology is somewhat mind boggling. The fax server market is very mature and has evolved, however the transport has not. etherFAX has created the largest ecosystem when it comes to fax and healthcare (https://etherfax.net/solutions/etherfax-sen https://etherfax.net/solutions/etherfax-sen). etherFAX supports and serves every major fax server application and EMR. Having over 6 million connected endpoints in healthcare allows for end-to-end encrypted transmissions and guaranteed delivery, without traversing the PSTN. The Fax Federation (faxfederation.com) allows for other fax server providers (like Twilio) to join said ecosystem.
- bankster 10y agoTons of great information on this thread. The idea that in the year 2017 we are transmitting sensitive data at modem speed technology is somewhat mind boggling. The fax server market is very mature and has evolved, however the transport has not. etherFAX has created the largest ecosystem when it comes to fax and healthcare (https://etherfax.net/solutions/etherfax-sen https://etherfax.net/solutions/etherfax-sen). etherFAX supports and serves every major fax server application and EMR. Having over 6 million connected endpoints in healthcare allows for end-to-end encrypted transmissions and guaranteed delivery, without traversing the PSTN. The Fax Federation (faxfederation.com) allows for other fax server providers (like Twilio) to join said ecosystem.