What does Twilio do?

Twilio makes a suite of products that helps you communicate with your customers via SMS, video, calls, and more.

web-apps

Last updated: July 4, 2025

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For a while, Twilio ($TWLO) made noise by putting up these billboards around San Francisco. The idea was that they didn’t need to advertise any specifics about the product – it was so popular, and so ubiquitous among technical teams, that all you needed to do was “ask your developer.”

Well, dear readers, I am your developer. And so today, we’re diving into Twilio, what exactly they do, and why that makes them worth so much cold hard cash.

The TL;DR

Twilio makes a suite of products that help you communicate with your customers via SMS, video, calls, and more.

Web and mobile apps need to communicate with users: think SMS and email code confirmations, etc.
On the backend, getting a phone number set up to send and receive texts / calls from programmatically is a huge PITA
Twilio started with one product – a simple SDK for programmatic SMS / calls
Since then, they’ve expanded the product suite to video, email, and WhatsApp

Like Stripe did with payments, Twilio took one piece of the developer workflow with a particularly tedious set of constraints, made it really simple to do via well designed APIs, and made a boatload of money off of it. A pattern I smell perhaps??

Terms Mentioned

HTTP

JavaScript

Client

Server

Infrastructure

Markup Language

Backend

API

Authentication

Database

Companies Mentioned

Twilio

$TWLO

Segment

$TWLO

The core Twilio product: comms as a service

Businesses today do a ton with SMS, phone, and video, from call centers to identity verification (MFA) to chat interfaces. And actually implementing that stuff yourself is incredibly difficult. Very few developers have expertise in the inner workings of telecom APIs.

Twilio exists to make all of the above really, really easy for developers. They take care of all of the infrastructure behind phone networks, and expose ergonomically designed APIs that let developers do things like create numbers and send or receive texts.

A common use case for Twilio is sending a text message. Let's say you're a developer building the login screen for your app, and you want your new users to verify their phones. To do that, you need to send a text to their number with a one time code, and have them enter that code on the site. Sending a text in Twilio is as easy is a few lines of code.

Communicating with your customers`

The `basic starting point here is why would you use Twilio? What exactly are businesses doing with SMS / phone / video? The answer is that they’re doing a lot, and use cases vary across the spectrum. Here are a few examples that might help: