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it's amazing that phaxio have gotten away with such high prices for so long.
by beaconstudios 10y ago
it'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.