Twilio is the 800lb gorilla in this space in terms of buzz, but it's fantastic to see that there's strong competition offering a wider set of countries and better pricing. We're using Twilio because they meet our requirements and the great sign-up promo, but phone numbers are not very sticky.
I really like where Plivo is heading and Venky (bevenky@HN) is very helpful.<p>I love that Plivo is concentrating on features and functionality that make building a scalable product easy. It's one thing dealing with the pain of scaling telephone infrastructure, but Plivo is allowing us to more easily scale our backend control infrastructure too (primarily though callbacks).<p>Not to mention that we are based in Australia, a country that is generally ignored by this type of service.
At least list out the 50 countries. After reading the blog post and hunting on their site for 10 minutes, i still cannot find the countries Plivo is compatible with.
Seems that for some of these countries (at least the UK), Twilio is still some way ahead, in that Plivo can't do outbound SMS or freephone numbers.<p>Noticed an interesting price thing with Twilio while comparing, which seems misleading to me... The big numbers on <a href="https://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing</a> for the UK state 10c/min for mobiles, but lower down the smaller print shows that this price is only for a few prefixes (44751, 44754, 44759, 447500), and that most mobile numbers (all other 447) are 32c/min.
Why does this article feel like a YC ad?<p>"Plivo makes it to 50 countries in 30 days". and "In many countries, setting up a phone solution is challenging and involves negotiations with carriers, hardware, and network configuration." Wouldn't that mean the startup has been working for some time to reach that scale? no offense for the startup, but the article sounds biased. I do not trust an article overly emphatic with few details.
This may not be particularly useful information and maybe it is just me but I have a serious case of word aversion to the name Plivo.<p><a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html" rel="nofollow">http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.h...</a><p><a href="http://www.good.is/post/why-do-we-hate-the-word-moist/" rel="nofollow">http://www.good.is/post/why-do-we-hate-the-word-moist/</a>
The business of adding a friendly web service on top of these SMS and IVR aggregators is already commoditized: Most aggregators will give you 10s of countries in a single integration.<p>Then it's a question of volume to reach higher tiers / lower costs, and/or getting enough funding to sustain low margins at launch.<p>Twilio has both the volume and the funding.
Hopefully Plivo can differentiate through innovation.