One SMS costs as much as 40 emails

transcript

Finance has a question. Why is SMS the whole bill? SMS is only 5 percent of the messages. Nearly 90 percent of the bill.

500 million notifications a day. Push is most of them. Then email, then in-app. SMS? A tiny 25 million a day.

Now the bill. Push costs nothing to send. Email, at 10 cents per 1,000. About 375,000 dollars a month. SMS? About 3 million dollars a month. That's 89 percent of the bill.

Each SMS costs a fraction of a cent. Sounds tiny, right? But one SMS costs the same as 40 emails.

Here's the catch. That's an assumed, negotiated local rate. At Twilio's list price to India, about 62 million dollars a month. And one rupee sign shrinks a segment to 70 characters. Unregistered templates don't get the local price at all.

So SMS is for OTPs, critical alerts and real push failures. Nothing else. Every SMS needs a reason.

Full breakdown in the lecture.