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Announcing Free Incoming SMS For All
- bevenky 12y agoThis is applicable even for our existing countries - US, Canada & UK!
- strick 12y agoI think the tabbed navigation on: https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ is going to confuse some users. Some people will never see the SMS pricing even though they are looking for it. Banner blindness is a real problem and applies not only to ads but to navigational stuff as well.
- liquidise 12y agoJust happened to me, in fact.
- instakill 12y agoI've always found it peculiar that Americans have to pay to receive SMS's or incoming calls.
- nhaehnle 12y agoThey even have to pay for incoming SMS? I understand the justification of paying for incoming calls, since they don't have separate prefix codes for mobile (which means that the caller does not know they're calling a mobile, and therefore you cannot put the charge on the caller), but incoming SMS, where you don't even get a choice over whether you want to receive it? "Peculiar" is putting that very nicely...
- k-mcgrady 12y agoThat sounds like it could be abused really easily. Can any Americans confirm if this is true that you have to pay to receive an SMS?
- heywire 12y agoMost definitely. That said, most carriers have started including unlimited SMS in their packages.
- mgkimsal 12y agoby "including" you mean "charging extra", right?
- jcurbo 12y agoYes, is it an extra surcharge for the unlimited plans. Typically you have a few packages to choose from, e.g. 100, 250, 500, unlimited per month.
- Someone1234 12y agoATT charges $20/month + tax for unlimited texting alone. Which is about £12. For £12 (inc. tax) on GiffGaff in the UK you get: - 250 minutes Calling - Unlimited texts - Unlimited Internet (no tethering, or £10 w/1 GB and tethering) So Americas get massively screwed on their wireless services. The fact that tons of people on here are praising the insanely expensive "Unlimited" texting offers is just bonkers. For the cost of just your unlimited texting in the US you can pay your entire monthly cellphone bill in the UK, consider that. And due to tax, surcharges, etc the $20/month is actually closer to $30/month.
- Jtsummers 12y agoT-Mobile has a $30/month pre-paid plan with 100 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data (unsure about tethering). I really wanted to like the plan and tested it out in my area with a Nexus 4 I picked up for playing around with an Android phone (only had iPhones the past few years, so wanted it for both development and to see if it was practical for me to switch). Unfortunately the coverage sucked once I left the area since they didn't offer data roaming. Great along the interstate, terrible in the country (I often take the scenic routes when traveling long distances if I'm not in a rush, I hate driving on the interstate.). If I lived in an area with really good T-mobile coverage and primarily traveled to those sorts of areas it'd be an awesome plan, and similar in cost to what you're talking about.
- meritt 12y agoIt's not all carriers and the vast majority of people simply pay for unlimited plans so it's a non-issue.
- rogerbinns 12y agoThere are very good reasons (for calls anyway), and arguably the rest of the world is broken. I wrote about it here http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/paying-for-incoming-calls.html http://www.rogerbinns.com/blog/paying-for-incoming-calls.htm... In short it is to with termination rates, area codes, and how people in the rest of the world get screwed but don't realise it.
- Someone1234 12y agoIn the UK if it starts with 07 it is to a mobile and if it starts with 01-03 it is to a landline. How very complicated! Plus doesn't the US have hidden rates too? If I call someone on a landline and they're in the same city I pay less than if I call someone two cities over even though the two MIGHT have the same exact area code ("long distance"). > Cellular was easily rolled out without disruption. An existing number could switch to cellular and no one else would have to know or care. If you were a business (eg a plumber) you didn't have to worry about people calling you fretting over getting charged more for the call than your competitors. > Numbers are easily portable. You can switch any number to use cellular. Countries using the other scheme can have portability but usually it is limited to cellular area codes only. That's a non-issue. Call forwarding exists outside the US too(!). You can buy generic numbers, or a landline that forwards to your cellphone (or rings at both). But ultimately your entire argument is defeated by one fact: In the US when a telemarketer calls you YOU pay for the pleasure. You're literally paying for people to spam or hassle you.
- MichaelGG 12y agoThe US is FULL of hidden rates! In fact, you can make a huge killing exploiting these things, and a lot people do exactly that. Some areas in the US cost multiple cents per minute. There is no such such as a flat rate to the US. People sell it, but they're just hoping you call cheap places, and if you don't, they cut you off. It surprises me how few people can do that math and love paying a flat rate. That's why so many free conference call places were in Iowa. They were exploiting the 5 cent tariffs Iowa had published in combination with people expecting all of the US to cost the same. Big carriers stopped terminating the calls, but the FCC slapped them back and insisted they had to terminate such calls.
- richardw 12y agoIt might be a holdover from "car phones", where incoming calls were charged for. Very few had them and it could be assumed that the owner had enough cash to pay for the privilege. IIRC the US had some version of cell phones before e.g. Europe, so probably kept the same business models. The rest of the world was able to rethink the model and with the benefits of hindsight, created cell-specific phone numbers and were able to charge callers rather than phone owners the extra portion.
- B5geek 12y agoI get Y-combinators' roots and purpose, but blatant advertising on HN is annoying and off-putting. And this example is vastly different then the "Hey look at the cool thing I made! p.s. I am selling it too."
- pessimizer 12y agoYou're against an advertising-supported internet? If so, there are places where you could start your protest that excute that a lot less transparently and with a few less orders of magnitude of vetting than here. Unless you prefer 'herbal Cialis' ads:)
- radiodario 12y agowait what you have pay for incoming SMSs in the US? what if you are being spammed? that is crazy.
- mikestew 12y agoYup, that you do, and crazy it is. What you're supposed to do is get the unlimited text plan so that it doesn't matter. If you don't use SMS enough to justify the $20/month for unlimited, too bad for you (at least for AT&T I'm pretty sure it's unlimited or $0.25/text these days, with nothing in between). Or just do what I did and switch to T-Mobile.
- shurcooL 12y agoOr do what I did and switch to a data-only plan. I like having my mobile provider be nothing more than a dumb pipe.
- klipt 12y agoHow do you make calls? I used to use Talkatone with Google Voice but the api they used was discontinued.
- dublinben 12y agoYou could use a paid VOIP provider like Voip.ms and make calls over your data connection. It's the same concept, except you're paying $0.01/minute instead of nothing.
- shurcooL 12y agoFaceTime audio, VoIP, textPlus, Skype, etc. I used Google Voice via Talkatone as well, but they offer their own VoIP solution now that the 3rd party GV API is discontinued.
- jonknee 12y agoPerhaps it's because they are paid for, but the US has remarkably little SMS spam.
- bambax 12y ago> So without further adieu You mean ado, which is an English word that means "difficulties, trouble, delay"; adieu is a French word for "goodbye".
- haakon 12y agoOne could be charitable and take this as a Futurama quote. Zapp Brannigan did say "without further adieu" (episode 1ACV10).
- autarchprinceps 12y agoPaying for incoming anything is completly ridiculous. Thankfully that's unusual here in Europe.
- rogerbinns 12y agoDo explain how you get screwed on mobile termination rates! Mobile phone calls are considerably more expensive in Europe per minute, but you as a recipient may not realise it. See my comment that points to a post with more details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8075829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8075829
- faster 12y agoMore expensive to whom? When I lived in France I paid 20 Euro per month for unlimited everything, including international calls to over 100 countries. As a subscriber, my per-minute rate was not of any concern to me since there wasn't one.
- rogerbinns 12y agoDid those unlimited international calls also include to international cell phones? Cell phones are usually excluded because the termination rates are so much higher as my calling card screenshot showed. Edit: I looked up free - a well known French ISP. Guess what - they have free calls all over the world to landlines, but charge for mobile - http://www.free.fr/adsl/telephone.html http://www.free.fr/adsl/telephone.html
- stephenr 12y agoThis just sounds like typical "America is the best". Yes, in every other country, the person making the call has to pay (unless its specifically a free call service). How does it make sense that someone can call/text you and it costs YOU money? The supposed "difficulty" in understanding call rates to me sounds like the same "difficulty" that keeps you lot off the metric system. But sure, keep telling us how the rest of the world is wrong - it doesn't make you look self obsessed at all.
- sologoub 12y agoAny plans to offer SMS on TFNs in US (like Twilio has)?
- hughes 12y agoThis sounds great! Here's hoping twilio/nexmo/etc will match.
- 0172 12y agoI think Nexmo had free incoming sms for years. You only pay for the virtual number.
- katiebug321 12y agoInbound messaging is always free with Nexmo- talk to me about it at katie.sullivan@nexmo.com
- mediaserf 12y agoIncoming/Responses are free on Nexmo
- codenut 12y agoWait what? We have for free since ages.
- cjoh 12y agoThey still charge 10x what Twilio does to send text messages.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mediaserf 12y ago?? Twilio is $0.0075 (.75 cents) per message, Plivo is $0.0065 (.65 cents) per message ...and I see many rate centers at .45 cents in Plivo
- sjtgraham 12y agoFalse Twilio $0.0075 Plivo 0.65¢ Notice the unit of account. Twilio absurdly uses $ while Plivo more sensibly uses ¢, I can't think of any other reason for this than to make it difficult to compare prices and encourage customers to fall into the trap you just did. Prices normalised: Twilio 0.75¢ Plivo 0.65¢
- nknighthb 12y ago> more sensibly Really? When I'm setting a budget, it's going to be in dollars. If I'm getting prices in cents, I have to remember to convert, or I'm going to make the same mistake your parent comment did. The currency is dollars, not cents. Most prices are set in dollars, not cents. Most transactions are performed in dollars, not cents. Budgeting is done in dollars, not cents. Save trouble and use the same units everybody else does.
- rohit6223 12y agoWho is "everybody"? and what unit do they use?
- katiebug321 12y agoNexmo is $0.0065 per message in the US, with the largest global reach out of any provider.
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- free2rhyme214 12y agoI know a more experienced engineer. He told me when engineers first invented texting to communicate with each other it's essentially free for telecom companies so yes we Americans are overpaying like crazy for texting.
- sjtgraham 12y ago> essentially free The marginal cost per message is essentially free. The costs of building, operating and maintaining telco infrastructure are unfortunately not.
- pcl 12y agoA number of comments express surprise that US carriers charge for inbound SMS traffic. Note that this announcement is with regards to an SMS gateway service, not regular end-user SMS traffic.
- _nedR 12y agoThe amount of abuse that the American consumer takes from telecos - Incoming SMS charges, incoming call charges, ridiculous post-paid rates, the colour of your iPhone tied to your carrier contract - beggars belief. You guys are still living under the delusion that the invisible hand of the free market will protect you, but what you don't realize is that the invisible hand is too busy in the pants of AT&T and Verizon to care about you. There are a lot of things wrong with India but the telecom industry here(at least up to around 2010) should be a showcase for regulation done right. Dirt cheap sms rates(around .001 usd), 3G rates, fixed monthly subscription charge for roaming, tower-sharing (multiple mobile operators share a cellular tower), number-porting, second-pulse billing,and around 10-11 operators to choose from. Sure, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India probably squeezed a little to hard and the 2G and 3G corruption scandals that followed reversed some of those trends to an extent; But the situation is still much better than in the US.
- rogerbinns 12y agoDon't forget the SMS spam :-) It is also a market where dual SIM phones are useful. Carriers are running promotions all the time, so consumers pick which SIM is offering the better deal on a call by call basis. Incoming call charges do make sense in the US and aren't as evil as everyone believes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8075829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8075829