Twilio Developer Evangelist here. Our Super SIM Product Manager @matjaxon had his comments held up since he has a new HN account so I'm passing this along from

Twilio Developer Evangelist here. Our Super SIM Product Manager @matjaxon had his comments held up since he has a new HN account so I'm passing this along from him: "You could send the same information to and from your devices using either SMS Commands or data but it would likely cost you a lot more to use SMS Commands. While our prices start at $0.10 per MB, we bill you in bytes. For example, if each time your device checks in you exchange 50 KB of data, you could do that 20 times for $0.10. You can only communicate with your device twice using SMS Commands at $0.05 per SMS Command. SMS Commands are often used as a way of configuring some IoT hardware solutions where you can set configuration values over SMS or to communicate with your device if it seems like something is going wrong with its data connection. It's an extra way of interacting with your device that may be deployed into the field thousands of mile away from you."