Much more expensive in Europe (e.g. major networks in Poland Twilio $0.03467, AWS $0.03897 - 0.07711)
1) have a specific price for every single network makes it impossible to calculate which will be the final real cost for each country
2) it's crazy expensive outside the US. Every player in the SMS industry is 4x lower on average. IE: http://www.mailup.com/pricing/sms/
3) they don't support text as a sender. In many countries you can have "MyCompany" as a sender instead of a generic number or short code. This makes the communication much more effective.
4) They claim the pricing will be different for transactional & marketing traffic, but it's not clear how , they just provide one only price list.
5) first 100 messages to US numbers free (each month). I expect they will be soon abused and they will retire this offering.
6) they don't support 2-way communication
7) SMS prices usually go down when volumes increase
They do support it in some countries [1]:
> AWS.SNS.SMS.SenderID > A custom ID that contains up to 11 alphanumeric characters, including at least one letter and no spaces. The sender ID is displayed as the message sender on the receiving device. For example, you can use your business brand to make the message source easier to recognize.
> Support for sender IDs varies by country. For example, messages delivered to U.S. phone numbers will not display the sender ID.
> If you do not specify a sender ID, the message will display a long code as the sender ID in supported countries. For countries that require an alphabetic sender ID, the message displays NOTICE as the sender ID.
[1]: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_publish-to-phon...
Poland is also cheaper at $0.022.
EDIT: Interestingly, Twilio seems to be cheaper on the phone number pricing slightly in Poland and substantially in Germany and France.
Why would a new company opt for Amazon at the risk of being copied and competed with as we're seeing with Netflix, Twilio, and numerous Amazon store vendors? Why not go with Google or Microsoft?
I didn't know this until I just tried it, but doing it over email supports replies (at least on AT&T), which is pretty cool.
I thought same thing as the parent when I started reading blog entry. Especially the part where opt-in requirement was removed.
Also, SMS is a substantial part of Twilio's business. Even though Twilio has been adding new extensions to their product, the majority of usage is tied to a small set of API calls.
Twilio now has a company with a huge developer audience going straight after their core business. One that is willing to be very aggressive on price to win share.
NOTE: Seems to be having issues sending SMSs to Australian mobile numbers - I've been tweaking and sending on the dashboard for a while now and nothing is coming through. Never mind - early days yet.
Am surprised at the cost differences between countries too - seems to be a lot more expensive than other third part SMS services I am using at the moment. (Comparatives - .009 cents for most US carriers, and 19 cents for most Aussie carriers!)
Amazon's service seems to be one-way. They don't seem to support SMS receive at all. They just blast out crap from their own shortcodes.
[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sms_manage.html
Sneaky, and would make me reconsider building on the platform if that were the case.
[edit] Makes sense, since we've seen them use this same method for their products and Amazon Basics™ line of products.
Eg. "Hello {{name}}"
An SMS to a number on a particular network provider should cost pretty much the same for all Messaging Platform Providers originating from the same countries.
