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Can someone explain what the pricing is for? Is Twilio charging for the IP delivery of SIP calls in addition to PSTN minutes? In the interest of full disclosur

Can someone explain what the pricing is for? Is Twilio charging for the IP delivery of SIP calls in addition to PSTN minutes? In the interest of full disclosure, I am the marketing/community guy for 2600hz, the open-source cloud telecom company, but I am genuinely curious what the per minute charge is for as it seems too low to include PSTN minutes.

sjtgraham 14y ago
Yes, but what is the problem with that? A call using Twilio does not necessarily have a PSTN component. It's the same principle as using Twilio Client; Twilio provides nice tools and clean APIs to code against, it's hardly unconscionable that they charge a peppercorn sum to use them. Disclosure: Former contractor/consultant at Twilio
- josh2600 14y ago
  Well there's no problem per se. I was curious what the cost structure was for. It seems odd, frankly, to charge $.005 as if it actually costs Twilio anything close to that. I mean per minute, a phone call is eating up a very small amount of data in a pure IP environment, so the profit margins on a charge like that are obscene (personal opinion). 64kbps for one minute is about 4 megs, and I can guarantee that's not $.005 to Twilio (it's likely several orders of magnitude lower in fact, which makes that charge basically pure profit). I just think it's wrong to charge for something that basically doesn't cost anything, and one that historically hasn't cost anything in Telcom (I'm referring to on-net calls here, at least over the last 20 or so years). Perhaps you can clarify something else for me: if you bridge a call to a SIP endpoint, is it two calls, like transferring or one call plus a SIP charge? I haven't played with the API so I wasn't sure what mechanism they use to bridge the endpoint to the call. Thanks so much for replying. Oh and one note, most carriers these days buy at sub $.01 per minute, so adding a 50% tax for SIP is not a peppercorn sum. Disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure: I'm the marketing/community guy for 2600hz, the open-source cloud telecom company. Edit: I reread this and realized it sounded a bit antagonistic. I'm really not trying to offend anyone, just trying to clarify why someone would be charging for on-net as that hasn't been the pattern in the industry for some time. It would be quite the coup if Twilio were able to bring back on-net billing as it is tremendously profitable. But again, I like the Twilio guys, I think they're amazing evangelists and they're doing great work in Telecom.
  - sjtgraham 14y ago
    Telephone calls on Twilio consist of one or more legs, e.g. consider a call center application where a caller dials a Twilio local US number (first leg at 1¢/min), your application returns TwiML with instructions to bridge the call to a SIP address (a 2nd leg at 0.5¢/min), total cost 1.5¢/min. I'm not sure if it's possible to initiate a SIP terminated call using the REST API, i.e. without PSTN/Client component. I haven't looked at the docs recently. You may or may not be right in this being exorbitant. Who are we to judge? The market will decide! :)
RobSpectre 14y ago
Great question Josh - always great to hear from you. Like all the voice services Twilio delivers, SIP from Twilio is metered through per-minute usage on each "leg." A leg refers to the connection of a voice call with respect to Twilio's cloud. Your inference from the pricing is accurate - SIP legs and PSTN legs are billed at different rates. These descriptions can get a little unwieldy in prose, so consider this quick example. Let's suppose you give me a ring at my Twilio number (718)989-1458 and I am at my desk with my SIP device. My per-minute Twilio usage for that call would be the sum of you calling my Twilio number over PSTN (1 cent per minute) and Twilio connecting that call to my SIP device (half cent per minute). In summary: - You to my Twilio number (PSTN): $0.01 per min - Twilio to my desk (SIP): $0.005 per min - Total: $0.015 per min Does that help?
- josh2600 14y ago
  Rob, as always, it's a pleasure :). So if I call you and you use a SIP handset to answer it's $.015 per minute? That accurately answers my question. I still disagree with charging for pure IP transit, but that's more of a marketing decision and I completely understand your reasons for doing so :). I'd argue that the $.005 is unnecessary and Twilio would simply benefit tremendously from the additional minutes volume from SIP apps, but you know your business better than I do :).
  - RobSpectre 14y ago
    I can totally understand where you're coming from with that perspective. Like Amazon, Heroku and other folks who are delivering valuable software through utility pricing, we do often have to answer why we charge what we do on a per-unit basis. This is particularly true of consumers of SIP products who have spent their entire lives outlaying huge capital expenditures to buy gear in order to get their business telephony apps running to connect their customers and employees and then connecting using another provider with a relationship governed by a different contract. Because the minutes used shows up on a different bill than the stuff that uses the minutes, it is easy to keep the two distant mentally. For Twilio, it shows up in the same place. What you pay for is a simple (and hopefully fun!) platform for changing the way your business communicates with everything you need to do it - IVRs, conferences, queues, voicemail, international, messaging and more. The way you pay is what we feel best aligns your interests with ours - only what you use, only when you use it. Like everyone else in startup tech, we hope we're delivering software at a price that reflects the value our customers get from it. This feels right for SIP From Twilio - hope you and others will continue to share your perspective if it doesn't work for you. Edit: fixed some typos.

sjtgraham 14y ago

Yes, but what is the problem with that? A call using Twilio does not necessarily have a PSTN component. It's the same principle as using Twilio Client; Twilio provides nice tools and clean APIs to code against, it's hardly unconscionable that they charge a peppercorn sum to use them. Disclosure: Former contractor/consultant at Twilio

josh2600 14y ago
Well there's no problem per se. I was curious what the cost structure was for. It seems odd, frankly, to charge $.005 as if it actually costs Twilio anything close to that. I mean per minute, a phone call is eating up a very small amount of data in a pure IP environment, so the profit margins on a charge like that are obscene (personal opinion). 64kbps for one minute is about 4 megs, and I can guarantee that's not $.005 to Twilio (it's likely several orders of magnitude lower in fact, which makes that charge basically pure profit). I just think it's wrong to charge for something that basically doesn't cost anything, and one that historically hasn't cost anything in Telcom (I'm referring to on-net calls here, at least over the last 20 or so years). Perhaps you can clarify something else for me: if you bridge a call to a SIP endpoint, is it two calls, like transferring or one call plus a SIP charge? I haven't played with the API so I wasn't sure what mechanism they use to bridge the endpoint to the call. Thanks so much for replying. Oh and one note, most carriers these days buy at sub $.01 per minute, so adding a 50% tax for SIP is not a peppercorn sum. Disclaimer in the interest of full disclosure: I'm the marketing/community guy for 2600hz, the open-source cloud telecom company. Edit: I reread this and realized it sounded a bit antagonistic. I'm really not trying to offend anyone, just trying to clarify why someone would be charging for on-net as that hasn't been the pattern in the industry for some time. It would be quite the coup if Twilio were able to bring back on-net billing as it is tremendously profitable. But again, I like the Twilio guys, I think they're amazing evangelists and they're doing great work in Telecom.
- sjtgraham 14y ago
  Telephone calls on Twilio consist of one or more legs, e.g. consider a call center application where a caller dials a Twilio local US number (first leg at 1¢/min), your application returns TwiML with instructions to bridge the call to a SIP address (a 2nd leg at 0.5¢/min), total cost 1.5¢/min. I'm not sure if it's possible to initiate a SIP terminated call using the REST API, i.e. without PSTN/Client component. I haven't looked at the docs recently. You may or may not be right in this being exorbitant. Who are we to judge? The market will decide! :)

RobSpectre 14y ago

Great question Josh - always great to hear from you. Like all the voice services Twilio delivers, SIP from Twilio is metered through per-minute usage on each "leg." A leg refers to the connection of a voice call with respect to Twilio's cloud. Your inference from the pricing is accurate - SIP legs and PSTN legs are billed at different rates. These descriptions can get a little unwieldy in prose, so consider this quick example. Let's suppose you give me a ring at my Twilio number (718)989-1458 and I am at my desk with my SIP device. My per-minute Twilio usage for that call would be the sum of you calling my Twilio number over PSTN (1 cent per minute) and Twilio connecting that call to my SIP device (half cent per minute). In summary: - You to my Twilio number (PSTN): $0.01 per min - Twilio to my desk (SIP): $0.005 per min - Total: $0.015 per min Does that help?

josh2600 14y ago
Rob, as always, it's a pleasure :). So if I call you and you use a SIP handset to answer it's $.015 per minute? That accurately answers my question. I still disagree with charging for pure IP transit, but that's more of a marketing decision and I completely understand your reasons for doing so :). I'd argue that the $.005 is unnecessary and Twilio would simply benefit tremendously from the additional minutes volume from SIP apps, but you know your business better than I do :).
- RobSpectre 14y ago
  I can totally understand where you're coming from with that perspective. Like Amazon, Heroku and other folks who are delivering valuable software through utility pricing, we do often have to answer why we charge what we do on a per-unit basis. This is particularly true of consumers of SIP products who have spent their entire lives outlaying huge capital expenditures to buy gear in order to get their business telephony apps running to connect their customers and employees and then connecting using another provider with a relationship governed by a different contract. Because the minutes used shows up on a different bill than the stuff that uses the minutes, it is easy to keep the two distant mentally. For Twilio, it shows up in the same place. What you pay for is a simple (and hopefully fun!) platform for changing the way your business communicates with everything you need to do it - IVRs, conferences, queues, voicemail, international, messaging and more. The way you pay is what we feel best aligns your interests with ours - only what you use, only when you use it. Like everyone else in startup tech, we hope we're delivering software at a price that reflects the value our customers get from it. This feels right for SIP From Twilio - hope you and others will continue to share your perspective if it doesn't work for you. Edit: fixed some typos.