Get alerts
All products/SMS & voice APIs/Twilio

Twilio pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Twilio (twilio.com) is a SMS and voice API. Pay-as-you-go per SMS segment, per voice minute and per successful Verify check, plus a monthly fee per phone number; volume discounts are quote-only.. No free plan.

What Twilio costs

  • 10k texts: $138.78/mo (Pay-as-you-go, no plan. 10,000 outbound x $0.0083 = $83.00; 1,000 inbound x $0.0083 = $8.30; one US local number $1.15; outbound carrier fees, simple average of AT&T $0.0035, T-Mobile $0.0045 and Verizon $0.005 = $0.00433 x 10,000 = $43.33; inbound carrier fees, average of AT&T $0.0035 and T-Mobile $0.0025 (Verizon inbound not published) = $0.003 x 1,000 = $3.00. Total $138.78. Volume discounts are quote-only, so none applied.)
  • 2k call min: $23.65/mo (Pay-as-you-go, no plan. 1,000 outbound minutes x $0.0140 (US and Canada rate; no mobile/landline split published) = $14.00; 1,000 inbound minutes x $0.0085 = $8.50; one US local number $1.15. Total $23.65. The page lists no programmable-voice API fee beyond these rates; Media Streams, recording, speech gather and answering-machine detection are optional and excluded. Volume discounts are not priced, so none applied.)
  • 1k OTPs: $54.13/mo (Twilio Verify, billed per successful verification: 900 x $0.05 = $45.00; 1,100 SMS x $0.0083 = $9.13 (SMS attempts are billed whether or not delivered). Total $54.13. No monthly fee and no sender fee; no Verify carrier surcharge amount is published, so none added.)

Plan compared: Pay-as-you-go messaging: 10,000 outbound and 1,000 inbound SMS a month on one US local number, carrier fees included. Prices are USD per month at each vendor's published US pay-as-you-go rates (or the cheapest plan or credit pack that covers the volume), including phone number rental and per-message carrier fees but excluding one-time sender registration fees, taxes and trial credit. The headline is 10,000 outbound and 1,000 inbound texts from one US local number; we also price 2,000 US call minutes and 1,000 OTP phone verifications.

What Twilio does

Core: Magic links & one-time codes (partly), RCS and other channels, Integrations and API, Two-way SMS API, Programmable voice, Verification API.

Important: Multi-factor authentication (partly), Bot & fraud protection (partly), Compliance & data residency, Bulk SMS campaigns (partly), MMS picture messages, WhatsApp broadcast campaigns (partly), Consent and compliance tools (partly), Sender number options, International SMS, Business phone numbers, US sender registration (partly), SIP trunking and BYOC, In-app and WebRTC calling, WhatsApp Business API, SMS pumping protection, Phone number intelligence, AI phone agent, Visual flow builder, SDKs and test tooling.

Also has: Passkeys (partly), Native mobile SDKs (partly), Two-way business texting (partly), Automated message flows (partly), Store-triggered flows (partly), Audience segmentation (partly), Click and revenue tracking (partly), Conversational chatbots (partly), Email marketing broadcasts (partly), Multichannel messaging API (partly), Security and compliance (partly).

Twilio price hikes

Cheaper alternatives to Twilio

At 10,000 US texts a month, Twilio costs $138.78/mo. 1 SMS and voice API costs less:

  • Sinch: $86.80/mo (Pay-as-you-go US 10DLC SMS at $0.0078 per message: 10,000 sent, 1,000 received, one number at $1.00/mo, monthly billing), covers 74% of Twilio; missing or partial: Verification API (partly), MMS picture messages (partly), Business phone numbers (partly), WhatsApp Business API (partly), SMS pumping protection (partly)

Twilio alternatives: 2 SMS and voice APIs compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Oct 2025 · Price increase: Studio's per-flow-execution price rose 150%, from $0.001 to $0.0025. PricingSaaS's snapshots bound the change to between Jul 20 and Oct 4, 2025; the later month is used here.
  • Jun 2025 · Price increase: US SMS messaging rose 5.1%, from $0.0079 to $0.0083 per message, which lifts the sms10k reference cost 3.3% with other fees held constant. PricingSaaS's snapshots date the change to between Jan 1 and Jun 22, 2025.
  • Apr 2024 · Price increase: TaskRouter's per-task price rose 140%, from $0.025 to $0.06. PricingSaaS's snapshots bound the change to between Nov 27, 2023 and Apr 1, 2024; the later month is used here.

Sources

Pricing page: twilio.com/en-us/sms/pricing/us. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Rates come from Twilio's US SMS page (current as of Oct 2026), US Voice page and Verify page (both as of Aug 2026); all three are pay-as-you-go, so there is no monthly or annual plan to compare. Verizon's $0.005 SMS fee comes from an unlabeled two-value table row, and PricingSaaS's pages conflict on when the SMS increase happened.