I have a client with 4 employees, but 12 DIDs through VI. His phone bill (including the slightly less than $36 for all of the DIDs) is about $37 a month. He’s a sub tenant off my account, so I pay all of the fees and taxes (his support fee pays for the rest of that). Even though I have to set up different PEER and USER accounts for them, I only needed to do it once.
Another example - a customer needed to set up a series of local numbers that auto-forwarded to other national phone numbers (to avoid Collect Call fees). These lines use inbound and outbound simultaneously. The bill for each of them is under $5 each.
I can repeat this story over and over again. Most of my clients are small businesses, and with the exception of the one that does outbound telemarketing, their phone bills are all in the “under $10” a month range.
There are people on here every few weeks complaining about Twilio. If you like them, terrific - use them. They were hard to work with when I needed their help, and none of the rest of my suppliers are. Their prices don’t make the headaches we see here worth the “savings”.
Not sure what problems other people have had, but Twilio is very cheap, easy to setup, multi tenant, no minimum commitment, and ive had no problems with audio or downtime in the last 2 years of using them for several businesses.
As for support, my experience has been that they have highly qualified and helpful techs, however i had a strange issue with fusionpbx and they were slow to help me resolve it, they seem pretty busy sometimes, but the issue did turn out to be an odd fusionpbx configuration that needed to be tweaked so not their fault
That said, I would just stick with a more competitive, traditional trunk provider.
The big down side to using Twilio as a Sip trunk is that you immediately loose everything that makes Twilio worth using in the first place. No web hooks, addons, or even basic caller ID.
My client already had a a Twilio account for sending SMS messages using their API… he saw no reason to get another provider.
Well considering that Twilio has a CallerID Lookup API calls which could be easily called on in FreePBX through various methods. So using the SIP trunk doesn’t take away, all the other stuff is still API and can be used.
Ok, old topic but the main reason I’m considering Twilio is because they support MMS.
Not a lot a lot of SIP providers (hardly any that I can find) support mms so you end up looking at external solutions like zipwhip for $35/mo just for mms. Consider the volume of calls and that at the price of $.0004/min my bill would probably be $5-$10/mo with Twilio, I cant justify $35 just for mms.
The question I have is - what’s the deal with the zone 1-5 thing? Different prices and I can’t figure out a pattern or reason. I guess I’ll call during biz hours tomorrow but those of you using it, have you bumped into this? Are they just uncommon/special extensions/prefixes or seriously rural areas? Or do you actually bump into these numbers? Because at $.25/min for a zone 5 call it adds up quick.
We use twilio and use an outbound rule to use a cheap unlimited sip for those odd rural numbers like sipstation and just buy 1 trunk for those times we do make a call to those numbers. Can create it by the prefix.
Unless you are getting a volume discount from Twilio, pricing from my experience has been better with Bandwidth, VoipInnovations, thinQ, etc. I’m sure there are plenty others.