4 ms·
They're a SaaS play with no lock-in. Which is great for businesses who want to use Twilio on a small scale then grow strategically. Sucks for Twilio because the
by josh_carterPDX 9y ago
They're a SaaS play with no lock-in. Which is great for businesses who want to use Twilio on a small scale then grow strategically. Sucks for Twilio because they want to have as much predictable revenue as possible.
- ithinkinstereo 9y agoI disagree about the no lock-in. Twilio just works. You can set it up and then forget about it, which I think is very appealing to the SMB market. The hassle of moving off Twilio likely outweighs the cost savings. So LTV is prob high and churn pretty low. As long as they can grow accounts, (which they are doing and the pace is accelerating), I think they'll be fine.
- mooreds 9y agoI think they are just like stripe. When you get to a certain volume you start to do the cost benefit analysis of moving off the saas provider. Until then they are the first choice for a large portion of the developer population. After that, it's just a numbers game: will it cost more to redevelop the functionality they provide (either on your own or with another vendor) than you will save over a reasonable timeframe? If the answer is yes, you keep paying twilio, otherwise out migrate. I have no first hand experience on what size makes sense for twilio, but this article gives us an upper bound (a huge one, to be sure).
- tyingq 9y agoI think there is a "no lock in" problem, depending on what their customers are using them for. One of Twilio's upstream providers, bandwidth.com, released their own api, and is undercutting them on pricing: https://www.bandwidth.com/pricing/ https://www.bandwidth.com/pricing/