I'm with you. It sounds like for any application that would use Twilio extensively, it might be better to roll your own. (not that I know how exactly, but I've read here someone saying it wasn't too big of a deal)
For example, if you have an app where one user would need to be on the phone say 6 hours a day, (could see that easily for customer support or sales) it goes to over $200 a month for a single user. You can probably find products and markets where that's fine but, it's difficult when compared to the typical price range of web-apps. Unless Twilio offers better pricing if you're a heavy user…
However, for applications where calls or text messages are a nice addition and not the core, it's nice to have services like these available.
If you want to roll your own, you can use the Asterisk open-source telephony platform (http://www.asterisk.org/) and use one of the many VOIP wholesale telecom providers. Just to level-set, long distance calls within the US from a wholesale provider with very little volume commitments can go for $0.001cpm.
Do you (or anyone else) happen to have any recommendations as far as low-cost SIP providers? I've been looking around lately and I haven't seen any that jumped out.
Good prices, great service, awesome call quality, and a web interface that doesn't suck. Calling 800 numbers is free and they support T.38. This is the last provider you'll need to evaluate :)
bandwidth.com - DIDs are 0.17$/month (800#'s are 0.25$/month), 2-way trunk for 30$ unlimited US, and awesome technical support.
Support story: We had some site in Texas making random calls to our 800# over the course of like 2 months before we noticed- hundreds of different CLIDs. They helped us identify it, and gave us a credit for three months for our trouble.
Hm, I couldn't find a price list for DIDs starting at 17 cents. Where is that? It seems like the only way to get a quote is to use that request-a-quote form.
For example, if you have an app where one user would need to be on the phone say 6 hours a day, (could see that easily for customer support or sales) it goes to over $200 a month for a single user. You can probably find products and markets where that's fine but, it's difficult when compared to the typical price range of web-apps. Unless Twilio offers better pricing if you're a heavy user…
However, for applications where calls or text messages are a nice addition and not the core, it's nice to have services like these available.