Just posted this on Anthony's blog, but thought I would post it here as well:<p>--<p>Hi Anthony,<p>I'm sorry that you feel we were't straight forward, although our goal was to be completely transparent in our communication with you about the status of this feature. Since the time of launch, we thought we had clearly messaged that international SMS has been an unsupported feature, and that the entire product was in beta status. We had published this fact on our SMS product FAQs, as well as in the public GetSatisfaction forums. Our apologies that we weren't clear enough about that fact, which caused you to roll international SMS features into your app.<p>We do pride ourselves on putting developers and their applications first, and in being open in our communications, product capabilities and limitations. Please feel free to email me at jeff@twilio.com, I'm always open to feedback, questions, comments or concern.<p>Sincerely,<p>Jeff Lawson
Co-Founder & CEO
Twilio.com
From the Google Cache of Twilio's International FAQ:<p>> You may send SMS from a Twilio number to an international number and find that it works. However, this is an unsupported feature and service outside the US may change at any time.<p>Can't get much clearer then that.<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=cache:http://www.twilio.com/faq/international" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?sourceid=chrome...</a>
Has anyone noticed an abundance of ranty blog posts (with authors who cannot distinguish between their/there) on HN lately? Here's the issue in brief:<p>> The email from twilio informed me they had, without warning switched off all international SMS functionality. ...they were able to massively degrade the functionality of our app – an app which not only do people pay for, they rely on.<p>Which I suppose is interesting enough, but then:<p>> But when it comes what really matters, being able to offer my customers a reliable service, you need a written agreement.<p>Which isn't exactly profound wisdom. If you're charging people for a service, you better make sure that you can hold your backend providers accountable for their end of the chain.
SMS is the ugly step-child of international communications, a thing that should cost $0, and should be easy has been made in to a nightmare to deploy and a patchwork of carrier related troubles.<p>I can fully understand their decision to go US only for now, but I <i>really</i> hope that at some point they'll be able to roll this out reliably world-wide, that alone would lay the world literally at their feet.<p>So many services are now hard to impossible to implement because there is no easy way of doing this, in my own site I would have several applications for it right away but <i>only</i> if I can guarantee international delivery.
I invite the author to sample the basket of shit that is SMS delivering services out there before complaining about Twilio.<p>We have <i>paid</i> for an "SDK" with one provider, they came to our office and installed a <i>hardware</i> device which we also had to buy, and they still can't manage to deliver 10% of our messages. That was in Australia.<p>After that mess, I personally wrote Twilio a letter asking them if I can help them establish themselves in Aus and the Middle East; which they declined, saying they were getting around to it themselves, which is good.<p>Bottom line: I would chalk this up as a slight oversight by a bunch of very capable, if very busy people, bless their heart.<p>They are one decision away from being fucked over by Skype and Google, if those two ever decide to compete with them. So I am rooting for our kids, even if they have to make gut-wrenching decisions like this on the spot.<p>Remember, just a year and a half ago they were nothing but a RESTful URL that accepted a few XML messages. They have come a long way, imo.
For those wondering about the technical aspects of this decision take a look at this thread:
<a href="http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1591m" rel="nofollow">http://getsatisfaction.com/twilio/topics/international_sms-1...</a><p>When we launched the Twilio SMS Beta we tried hard to support sending SMS messages to both US and International destinations. When there were problems, we worked with our customers to collect forensic data on hundreds of carriers worldwide and pass it to our carriers partners to debug.<p>At Twilio we are dedicated to working with top quality carriers and technology. After months of working to fix problems, were not able to deliver the reliable International SMS service our customers have come to expect.<p>We apologize for any problems this has caused for our customer and we'll work to bring back International SMS service after were able to deliver on the quality we do the rest of Twilio services.<p>Cheers,
-Evan<p>CTO and Co-Founder
As a <i></i>heavy<i></i> user of twilio (I work at groupme.com, we're entirely text message based, and built entirely on twilio), I'll say that every time we've broached the topic of international SMS, they've always cautioned us that it's experimental, and so we've explicitly marked our product as such (USA only for now).<p>That's not to say that we don't want international bad, but we pretty much trust their judgement as to whether or not they say a product is ready or if it ain't. Twilio does good work, and they're amazingly responsive to developer requests/feedback.
So Twilio as an unsupported service which they charge others for it.
They choose to close the service and don't have the courtesy to inform users before that and now say the service was beta/unsupported and they are sorry for it?<p>That's really lame...<p>They have the obligation to inform users they're going to close a service, whether it's beta or not.
The answers they gave is not the way to do it, giving an excuse because the service was unsupported and completely ignoring their fault in warning their users shows that they don't give a damn about the users.<p>There's nothing wrong in coming here and apologize for not giving a warning before closing the service, but they choose not to do it...
That is really too bad all around.<p>The state of SMS is ridiculous. We go through a gateway. Certification was painfully slow, and the cost... OMFG the cost of a text. -It's as if the alphanumerals had to be mined, shipped, refined, and then placed into each message by hand.<p>I applaud Twilio for what they are trying to do. IMO, they are playing interference for an ugly beast.
This is worrying. We're using Twilio in my app - they've been good to us so far, certainly very friendly and helpful. The service has been spotty at times, but mostly reliable. Most of our customers are based in U.S./Canada, and all paying customers are; we also had a backup SMS delivery built recently. However, providing absolutely no notice (didn't seem like I missed an email from them) of such a significant change in service certainly isn't a good way to go about this.
This retort to Twilio is just as unprofessional as their "poor service."<p>As others have pointed out, SMS is an unsupported feature and service outside the US can change at any time.<p><i>So in conclusion, apart from twilio losing one of there early adopters (task.fm isn’t a big customer, but that doesn’t mean we can be screwed over) they are also damaging there brand. They used to be all about developers.</i><p>I think only getting miffed that your <i>OWN</i> service wasn't perfect and then posting to HN about how task.fm was "screwed over" is more damaging to twilio (is it?) than an SMS outage.<p>The author didn't read Twilio's own SLA and hardened entrepreneurs don't burn bridges publicly everytime something goes wrong.<p>I know trying to build an awesome web application is hard and its frustrating when supporting services go down, but that is the nature of our beast. We build on top of each other, so we must respect and support each other. Getting mad and cutting off your own hand because you are angry isn't helping build anything.<p>Google's API has bugs that my start-ups web application runs into all the time. Sometimes they change API behavior, which the visualization screws up the entire UI in the process. <i>This effects thousands of our users and we have to release work-arounds as fast as we can.</i> But I don't blame Google - it was our choice to use their APIs.<p>Generally, this sort of thing will continue to happen with all web service APIs. As a community of developers, I would ask them why it happened and provide constructive feedback about how important it was. You might just find they'll listen and you'll have more pull.<p>Great start-ups have a short list of early adopters or engaged users that they trust and continually go back to for product advice. Writing a post like this pulls the rug out from under your own service because you refuse to use it, it will cost you more, and twilio will suffer from lack of valuable constructive feeback.<p>Really just my POV, but hopefully you'll find why posting inflamatory articles like this only hurts entrepreneurs and our community at large. At most it sets an example of how we treat each other.
For the record - I should have said this in the original post, I like twilio. I liked their business model and I really liked the product.<p>I had multiple email conversations with twilio team members over the past year and "caution" wasn't something I would say was strongly portrayed
It's 11:24 in phoenix. I just finished a 6 hour sprint working on an app that will rely 100% of the Twilio api, so the headline caught my attention. By the time I came back both the CEO and CTO gave an explanation and apologized. I can respect that. I hope Task.fm gets back on track as well.<p>Edit: J, maybe reimbursing him would not hurt.
Their current faq states that they don't deliver sms internationally.<p><a href="http://www.twilio.com/faq/international" rel="nofollow">http://www.twilio.com/faq/international</a><p>Based on that I presume they switched off the feature globally and not just for you. Correct?<p>That doesn't mitigate your complaint.if anything, doing that without advance notice is worse. Did they provide any explanation in the email?<p>Twilio has between a very reliable provider in my experience so far, so this is worrisome.
I'd like to hear Twilio's side of it; they seem like such a great company this feels... weird coming from there. I think there's more to this story.<p><i>waits patiently</i>
I have founded Nexmo.com, Low Cost SMS API (in private beta), early this year after spending 7 years in the Wholesale SMS industry. Delivering awesome SMS service on a global scale is tricky – but it should not be! We just finalised building our back-end SMS network.<p>Here are some challenges the industry faces:
———————————————————-<p>-Many intermediaries to reach end-users:<p>Between an App and an end-user you can get up to 4 or 5 intermediaries operating their own infrastructure. Adding intermediaries not only increases cost but also exponentially reduces quality – QOS is measured in terms of availability, delivery ratios, speed, features supported, etc…<p>Ask your provider about their sourcing strategy? Who do they buy from? Do they have a strict policy in terms of suppliers’ selection? Can they share delivery ratios?<p>-SLA does not really matter:<p>What if the providers of your provider do not guarantee any SLA?
A provider can potentially guarantee an SLA on its own infrastructure but can’t control what happens afterwards.<p>-Non transparent fees:<p>Customers get charged on SMS sent to networks that are not or poorly covered but listed as LIVE in the provider’s reach list – even when you sign a written agreement.<p>-Tricky to reach all Networks:<p>Some networks in the world are tricky to reach and sometimes the only reliable way to deliver SMS is to connect directly. Other are installing SMS filters to cut certain type of traffic (e.g. Spam). For instance, if your provider mentions networks such as Comcell Colombia or IAM in Morocco, you’d rather check again because these networks are impossible to reach with full feature support/reliable service without direct connections. Currently there are at least 26 networks that are tricky to reach and 22 that are filtering.<p>Another rule of thumb is to check whether in Europe their prices are above $0.055, since European Wireless Carriers (also applicable to other regions/countries) require a termination cost for reliable SMS routes. If below that price, it could mean that your provider (or the provider of your provider!) is using unsolicited routes that are not reliable/has limited life time.<p>———————————————————————————————————<p>Delivering hassle free (and Low Cost!) global SMS termination is not obvious but we are working on it :)<p>Tony Jamous
twitter: @nexmo
e-mail: tony.jamous [@] nexmo.com
I was wanting to use Twilio for UK SMS sending but the system couldn't send to my own mobile. I emailed again a few weeks back and it was still "unsupported".<p>I'm glad it didn't work on my own mobile as I would have definitely integrated it into my site and no doubt run into the same huge problem here!
Presumably, Twilio knows who their top users of the international SMS feature are. Why not just look at the logs and email the top users, telling them the service is going to be discontinued?
This isn't rocket science, people.
(cross posting my comment from his blog)<p>Sorry buddy; your post is basically a hit piece about an experimental service which stopped working. It seems they sent out an email and marked it on their status page.<p>So I'm going to categorize you with the other startup people who have pretty blog and hurt feelings for your own mistakes.<p>I hope I never do business with people like you.
This is an important lesson for any startup. Don't rely on free services, insist that you pay for them and set up an agreement.<p>But it is also a lesson from the other end. Twilio would probably not have done this lightly. By not offering agreements for there free service, they had the option of choosing to disappointing their users instead of loosing what might be a lot of money. It's never the easiest decision but it in some cases it is the best option.