Marginally cheaper than Twilio for USA: $0.00645 vs. $0.0075

Much more expensive in Europe (e.g. major networks in Poland Twilio $0.03467, AWS $0.03897 - 0.07711)

https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing

http://aws.amazon.com/sns/sms-pricing/

Excellent news - I have been waiting for this for a while.

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!)

More like "Amazon AWS introduces worldwide SMS spamming". They changed their service from opt-in to opt-out. Even after the recipient opts out, the spammer can override and opt them back in against their will.[1] There's even an API for doing that in bulk.

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

I like that we can choose between transactional and promotional messages in order to optimize for high delivery success rate or cost savings.

When I did programmatic SMS for a project ~10 years ago, I just used SMTP and the email equivalent of the SMS address. I haven't done similar projects since then, so I'm curious if there is some reason that approach would no longer work.

Does this mean I'm about to get a lot more spam directly to my phone?

My guess is that there is already a team at Amazon working on a voice/webrtc and SIP trunking AWS product for a 2017 launch.

I wonder how this will affect newly IPOed twilio

India pricing is atleast twice the price of any decent SMS provider in the country at 0.0045 USD per transactional SMS.

Interesting timing considering Twilio's IPO

Really nice to have precise SMS delivery reports automatically pushed to Cloudwatch Logs. Makes it fit very nicely into the whole AWS offering (eg. automatically trigger a Lambda function to act upon a failed delivery).

Now, when would they make something like that that would go backwards? I want to strap a GSM module to a balloon, let it fly around the world and SMS it's position every so often.

I wonder if AWS uses a startup/company's reliance/traffic on their service to investigate what services to offer people. Using metrics for client services/infrastructure running equates to demand and possible revenue insights, (eg Twilio) could be used to dictate what to build next.

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.

Flowroute is $.004 https://www.flowroute.com/sms/faq/

This'll be nice to receive SMS alerts on deployment or monitoring failures when using other AWS services. I don't think it compares to Twilio, since it seems to be more for alerts than for your main application use; you could cobble together something that creates a new SNS topic for each (user, phone number), but I'd doubt my ability to keep so many topics organized.

I'm surprised they offer messaging in China. Our China SMS provider (yuntongxun.com) only allows templated SMS messages.

Eg. "Hello {{name}}"

I'm surprised at the variability of pricing by different vendors in this space. I would have imagined they would all be competing on breadth of API rather than price.

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.

..but why? How is this relevant to their business? I mean, I do understand that AWS and Amazon (the e-commerce) don't have anything in common, but why to focus on such a product that already exists (and that's even better)?

it's curious that they announced the service after twilio IPO

Just compared their pricing to Nexmo here in Norway. Almost double the price. AWS: $0.09109. Nexmo: $0.0530.

Why are UK SMSs so expensive?

Great news! Amazon will get into any kind of service that is part of an infrastructure. There are a one-stop shop of building blocks required to build a web service. Their inventory is only going to get diverse and bigger.