This product is intended for use in IoT devices and not really for 'iPhone use'. A few things to consider: First of, in the telecom market, there are two ways

This product is intended for use in IoT devices and not really for 'iPhone use'. A few things to consider: First of, in the telecom market, there are two ways to get a discount: Buy more SIM cards, or buy more data. Let's say you offer a track-and-trace product, have deployed 1000 GPS trackers, you can easily get the monthly fees and the usage fees down to cents. Same goes for your 'GB-per-month' personal phone subscription, you buy more data, you get it cheaper. But since roaming will always be costly, even for wholesale carries, SIM card subscriptions that can be used globally are almost always A. expensive, or B intended for IoT (low usage). (GPS, trackers, sensors, feedback buttons, etc). Twilio is focussing on the latter with this SIM. That brings us to NB-IoT and LTE cat M. LTE cat M(machine) is basically a stripped down LTE modem, while an NB-IoT modem (or LTE cat Narrowband) is a stripped down LTE cat M modem. Network parameters for these types of connectivity have been tweaked in favour of power consumption at the costs of low bandwidth and high latency. You could say that LTE-M is used for 'MB's per month'-devices (smartwatch for example) and NB-IoT is used for 'bytes per month' devices (is my container full already). NB-IoT is cheap, extremely power efficient, but is not intended for moving devices. LTE-M can be used for more demanding applications, like smartwatches, panic buttons (including voice) etc. It can also be used in roaming applications, but that's it. No streaming video etc. So if you are looking to deploy a large scale IoT application, you want cheap, simple and energy-efficient hardware, which is why you need NB-IoT or LTE-M. You could go for other technologies like Sigfox or LoRaWan, but they are inferior to NB and LTE-M if you ask me (roaming, availability of network/hardware). In my view, Twilio does a great job of offering all kinds of telecom services (one stop shop), a common strategy in telecom called 'bundling'. But if you know what you want and where to look, you can get much better rates... Margins are great on this, I can assure you that :)