The company behind the hottest tech IPO of the year has a new plan to make more money
Meet the Twilio Enterprise Plan, a new plan starting at $15,000 per month that makes the company's products way more palatable to large businesses - a highly lucrative market.
This isn't the first time that Twilio has worked with the enterprise since it was founded in 2008: Big companies like Nordstrom, ING, and Nike have all used Twilio to power stuff like sending text messages to customers, making automated phone calls, and even building the backbone of call centers.
"We've been launching the features that enterprises need for some time," says Twilio VP of Product Patrick Malatack. "This isn't new for Twilio."
Building blocks
The key to Twilio's appeal, and its strong revenue, is a kind of "building block" approach. Twilio's products are part of a new wave in programming, where you just plug the components you need into the backend of your app, as you need them. If you need a feature that sends texts, as Uber did, just plug in Twilio and go.
The Enterprise Plan "packages" all of the features that those big customers have requested over the years, including sign-on and auditing features that make it easier to view and control which employees are using which Twilio tools, Malatack says.
But, importantly, the Enterprise Plan isn't a shift in strategy for Twilio, Malatack insists. It's the same "building blocks," just with finer-grained controls that make it more appealing to big businesses. They get the same ability to build voice and text features faster, but customers' CFOs and CIOs can sleep better at night.
"Twilio has this model of innovation that enterprises love," Malatack says.