Telnyx vs Twilio vs Plivo in 2026: Real Per-Minute, SMS and Number Costs

Telnyx undercuts Twilio by half on published US voice rates and Plivo sits between the two. That part is easy to establish. What the rate cards do not tell you is that the messaging gap shrinks by a third once carrier surcharges reach the invoice, that Telnyx bills a call in two pieces rather than one, and that Telnyx does not publish international rates at all. Below are the current numbers, read from each vendor’s own pricing pages on 14 September 2026, with the arithmetic done on volumes a real CPaaS migration would involve.

US Voice Pricing, Side by Side

Telnyx bills the two halves of a call separately, which is why a first read of its pricing page understates the rate. The Voice API costs $0.002 a minute; the SIP trunk underneath it costs $0.005 outbound and $0.0032 inbound for US local numbers. The Telnyx column above is the two added together, because that is what lands on the invoice and the only figure comparable with Twilio and Plivo. If you use Telnyx as a plain SIP trunk and run call control yourself, you pay the trunking rate alone — $0.005 out, $0.0032 in.

What That Costs at 100,000 Minutes

Voice has no carrier pass-through to muddy this, so the gap on the rate card is the gap on the bill. At a million outbound minutes a month the same rates produce a $7,000 monthly difference between Twilio and Telnyx, which is the point at which a migration pays for itself inside the first quarter. Below roughly 50,000 minutes it usually does not: the engineering time costs more than the saving for at least a year.

SMS at Scale: the Rate Card Is Not the Invoice

US carrier surcharges are added on top of every one of those rates, and they are identical on all three platforms because the carriers set them, not the vendors. AT&T charges $0.0035 per outbound segment, T-Mobile $0.0045 outbound and $0.0025 inbound, Verizon $0.0045 outbound. Nobody marks them up and nobody can discount them.

That flat addition compresses every percentage. Take a million outbound long-code segments a month with a $0.0035 surcharge: Twilio bills $8,300 of base plus $3,500 of surcharge, or $11,800. Telnyx bills $4,000 plus $3,500, or $7,500. Plivo bills $7,700 plus $3,500, or $11,200. Telnyx is 52% cheaper on the rate card and 36% cheaper on the invoice; Plivo is 7% cheaper on the rate card and 5% cheaper on the invoice.

Phone Numbers, and the Fee Nobody Mentions

Twilio and Plivo publish one flat monthly rental per US local number — $1.15 and $0.50. Telnyx publishes a volume ladder instead: $1.00 pay-as-you-go, $0.79 for the next 200 numbers, $0.50 for the next 750, $0.39 for the next 4,000 and $0.25 beyond 5,000. If you run a large pool of numbers, that ladder is a bigger saving than the per-minute rate.

Telnyx also charges $0.10 a month per number to enable SMS and MMS on it. On a hundred numbers that is $10 a month and nobody notices. On ten thousand it is $1,000 a month that does not appear in any rate comparison, including the tables above, and it is the single most common surprise in a Telnyx bill.

Outside the US, the Comparison Changes

US rates are the only ones all three publish openly. Twilio and Plivo publish a per-country page for every destination they serve. Telnyx publishes US rates and a downloadable global SIP trunking price sheet, but no per-country table you can check in a browser — so a like-for-like international comparison cannot be made from public pages at all.

Two things stand out. Plivo, which is only 18% cheaper than Twilio on US outbound, is roughly half the price on UK landline and 45% cheaper on UK and Australian inbound — the ratios do not carry across borders, so a US-rate comparison tells you very little about a UK or Australian deployment. And on the routes people most often ask us about, the answer is not in a table: on a Telnyx quote you have to ask, and on any of them the delivered audio quality on a given route matters more than the tenth of a cent between them.

Call Quality

In our own testing — one million minutes across the three platforms over three months for a contact centre client — US domestic quality was excellent everywhere, with MOS (Mean Opinion Score, the standard voice quality metric) averaging 4.2 to 4.4 out of 5 on all three. International told a different story. Twilio has the largest carrier network and consistently delivered the best international quality, particularly to India, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Telnyx was close behind for Europe and Australia. Plivo struggled with several Latin American destinations.

That test ran in 2024 and we have not repeated it since. Carrier routes are re-tendered constantly and a route that was poor two years ago may be fine now, so treat it as a reason to test your own destinations for a week before committing rather than as a current scoreboard. Every one of these platforms will let you do that on a pay-as-you-go account for the price of a few hundred test calls.

Latency

For AI voice agents, call setup latency — the time from API call to first ring — matters more than in-call latency, because it is dead air the caller experiences before anything can mask it. In the same 2024 benchmark, from India-based servers calling US numbers, Twilio averaged 350ms, Telnyx 290ms and Plivo 380ms. Telnyx’s advantage was real but small next to the effect of running your agent in the same region as the carrier edge, which is worth far more than 60ms. We cover where the milliseconds in a voice agent actually go on our running-cost page.

Developer Experience

Migrating off Twilio

Telnyx is the least disruptive destination because TeXML accepts TwiML documents: the call control layer you already wrote mostly transfers, and the work concentrates in webhook payload shapes, number porting and re-testing your IVR paths. Plivo uses its own XML, so the call control documents get rewritten — mechanical work, but it touches every callback. We have written up what a Plivo move involves in detail in Plivo vs Twilio in 2026.

On every migration we have run, number porting is the long pole and not the code. Allow weeks rather than days, expect the incumbent to be unhurried, and keep both accounts live and running traffic in parallel until the last number has moved. If you are comparing contact centre platforms rather than raw APIs, Amazon Connect vs Twilio Flex is the comparison you actually want.

Which to Choose

• Twilio: the safe enterprise default. Best international carrier coverage, the deepest documentation, and the product surface — Verify, Studio, Flex, Conversations — that nobody else matches. Also the least argument in a regulated industry, with a HIPAA BAA and SOC 2.
• Telnyx: the best value for US and European voice at volume, at half Twilio’s outbound rate and the lowest setup latency we measured. TeXML compatibility makes the migration genuinely low-risk. Budget for the $0.10 per number messaging fee, and ask for international rates before you commit.
• Plivo: strongest on number rental and on non-US routes, where its rates diverge from Twilio much further than the US comparison suggests. A reasonable middle ground when you want a saving without a Telnyx-scale rebuild.
• SignalWire: the cheapest US rates after Telnyx, with a smaller ecosystem and fewer integrations. Worth a look if your usage is narrow and price-driven.

Is Telnyx cheaper than Twilio?

On US voice, yes, and by a wide margin: $0.0070 against $0.0140 a minute outbound, $0.0052 against $0.0085 inbound. On US SMS the base rate is 52% lower but the identical carrier surcharge on both cuts the real saving to about 36%. Internationally there is no published answer, because Telnyx does not publish per-country rates.

What does Twilio charge for inbound calls in Australia, and what does Telnyx charge?

Twilio publishes $0.0100 a minute to receive a call on an Australian local number, plus $3.00 a month for the number. Plivo publishes $0.0055 a minute and $2.50 a month. Telnyx publishes Australian local numbers from $2.00 a month but does not publish an Australian per-minute inbound rate on its public pages — you have to request the global price sheet or ask sales. If Australian inbound is the bulk of your traffic, get that figure in writing before you compare.

Plivo or Telnyx — which should we pick?

Telnyx if the traffic is US voice and high volume: it is 39% cheaper than Plivo on outbound US minutes and its TeXML layer means less rewriting if you are coming from Twilio. Plivo if the traffic is international, or number-heavy at small scale — $0.50 a month per US number against Telnyx’s $1.00 list, and materially cheaper UK and Australian rates. What you give up with Plivo is the lowest per-minute rate; what you give up with Telnyx is published international pricing.

What is the cheapest way to buy US local numbers through an API?

Plivo and SignalWire at $0.50 a month per number, flat, with no minimum. Telnyx starts at $1.00 but drops to $0.39 past 950 numbers and $0.25 past 5,000, so it wins on any large pool — as long as you add its $0.10 a month SMS/MMS enablement fee to the comparison if the numbers need to text. Twilio at $1.15 is the most expensive of the four and buys you the largest inventory and the fastest provisioning.