> On top of all that, high volume customers would move directly to these consolidators.
This is pretty key to understanding Twilio's prospects as a business. In my experience, they are fantastically easy to integrate at first.
But they come with a cost that blows up your financial model if your product is any kind of high-volume use case, or if SMS is factored in as a direct cost and you're talking to investors about unit economics. At some point you have to get off of them and onto a cheaper-per-SMS solution, even if it costs more dev hours to maintain.
This is pretty key to understanding Twilio's prospects as a business. In my experience, they are fantastically easy to integrate at first.
But they come with a cost that blows up your financial model if your product is any kind of high-volume use case, or if SMS is factored in as a direct cost and you're talking to investors about unit economics. At some point you have to get off of them and onto a cheaper-per-SMS solution, even if it costs more dev hours to maintain.