See Twilio's usage-based pricing, API features, and how the leading cloud communications platform for SMS, voice, and email compares to alternatives.
Twilio is a cloud communications platform that gives software developers a set of APIs to add voice calls, text messages, WhatsApp conversations, video, and email directly into their own products. Instead of negotiating with telecom carriers or building signaling infrastructure, a developer can send an SMS or place a phone call with a few lines of code while Twilio handles the underlying carrier relationships, number provisioning, and global routing behind the scenes.
Founded in 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis, Twilio launched with a single product, an API for making and receiving phone calls, and grew into the category-defining communications platform as a service (CPaaS) company. It went public on the NYSE in 2016 and has since expanded well beyond voice and SMS into email delivery through its SendGrid acquisition, customer data infrastructure through its Segment acquisition, authentication, and AI-assisted conversation tools.
Today Twilio is used by companies ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises such as Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and Netflix to power appointment reminders, delivery notifications, one-time passcodes, customer support chat, marketing messages, and call center infrastructure. Its pay-as-you-go pricing and broad geographic carrier coverage make it a default choice for teams that need reliable, programmable communications at scale.
Twilio's product suite spans several core communication channels. Programmable Messaging covers SMS, MMS, RCS, and WhatsApp Business API access, letting applications send and receive text-based conversations globally. Programmable Voice provides APIs for making, receiving, recording, and routing phone calls, including interactive voice response, call conferencing, and SIP trunking for connecting existing phone systems.
Beyond raw messaging and voice, Twilio Verify handles one-time passcodes and two-factor authentication out of the box, while Lookup provides phone number validation and carrier or line-type intelligence used for fraud prevention. SendGrid, Twilio's email infrastructure product, delivers transactional and marketing email at scale with deliverability tooling. Segment, Twilio's customer data platform, unifies behavioral and profile data across tools so marketing and product teams can build a single customer view.
More recent additions include Conversations, an API for orchestrating multichannel customer conversations across SMS, WhatsApp, and chat in a single thread, and Conversation Relay along with AI-driven Conversation Intelligence, which layer generative AI on top of voice and chat interactions for tasks like automated summarization, sentiment detection, and voice agents.
Twilio uses purely usage-based, pay-as-you-go pricing across nearly all products, with no mandatory monthly subscription for the base APIs. SMS starts around $0.0083 per message, WhatsApp messaging starts around $0.005 per message, voice calls start at roughly $0.0085 per minute to receive and $0.014 per minute to make, and Verify starts at $0.05 per verification. SendGrid email offers a free tier of 100 emails per day, with paid plans starting at $19.95 per month for higher volume.
Enterprise customers with high volume can negotiate custom, discounted rates, and Segment's customer data platform pricing is quote-based depending on monthly tracked users and data volume. New accounts can start with free trial credit and no upfront credit card requirement, letting developers prototype before committing to production spend.
Twilio is used by developers to add communication features, such as SMS, voice calls, WhatsApp messaging, email, and two-factor authentication, into their own applications via APIs.
Twilio is not free for production use, but new accounts get free trial credit to test the APIs, and SendGrid offers a free tier for up to 100 emails per day.
Twilio charges on a usage basis, meaning you pay per SMS sent, per minute of a call, per email sent, or per verification, rather than a flat monthly subscription.
Twilio was founded in March 2008 by Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke, and John Wolthuis.
Yes, Twilio has been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker TWLO since 2016.
SendGrid is Twilio's email delivery product, acquired in 2019, used specifically for sending transactional and marketing email, while Twilio's core APIs handle SMS, voice, and messaging channels.
Twilio is used by companies including Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, and Netflix, among hundreds of thousands of businesses of all sizes.
Common alternatives include Vonage (Nexmo), Bird (formerly MessageBird), Plivo, Sinch, and Amazon SNS/Pinpoint.