Why Businesses Are Switching from Twilio to Telnyx

Healthcare startups running AI patient intake. Political consultancies texting voters at scale. Smartwatch makers keeping families connected. Satellite TV providers billing prepaid customers across the Caribbean. Contact center platforms expanding into Latin America. AI calling platforms dialing thousands of prospects a day. Brazilian fintechs running voice AI across five regions. Puerto Rico government contractors routing 10 million calls a year. AI-native startups replacing three vendors at once.

These companies share very little in terms of industry, size, or geography. What they share is a decision: they evaluated or ran on Twilio, and they moved to Telnyx instead. The reasons cluster around four structural problems that no API update or pricing tweak can fix, because the problems are the architecture itself.

What they found on the other side is a carrier that owns its own network, its own GPU infrastructure, and its own AI platform. One stack. One bill. One escalation path.

Here is why they switched.

Latency: When every millisecond counts

Voice AI has a latency budget measured in milliseconds. A conversation turn that takes a full second feels broken to the caller. That single second is the difference between a patient who engages with an AI agent and one who hangs up and calls the front desk.

Ultradoc, a healthcare AI platform, learned this firsthand. They tried Retell AI (a wrapper on top of ElevenLabs and Twilio), then tried ElevenLabs and Twilio directly. The result was the same.

The phone agents had ridiculously long response times. "I would say something and get a response a second later. That's terrible. It should be instant," said Vincent Sajkowski, CEO and co-founder of Ultradoc.

The problem was structural. On a stitched-together stack, every conversation turn hops between a telephony vendor, a speech-to-text vendor, an LLM vendor, and a text-to-speech vendor. Each hop adds latency. The speed tax is baked into the architecture.

Ultradoc found Telnyx while investigating ElevenLabs' supported phone providers. "I saw you had your own voice AI implementation, and that you host the models locally, everything on one infrastructure. I tried that and was like, wow, this thing responds so fast. That was one of the main things that sold me."

On Telnyx, STT, LLM inference, TTS, and call control run on one owned stack. The latency drop is not incremental. It is structural. Sub-200ms round trips on a HIPAA-compliant pipeline, with a BAA in place.

Neon Health, another healthcare AI company, hit the same wall. Their AI agents call insurance providers, navigate phone trees, and secure authorizations on behalf of patients. On Twilio, latency compounded at each handoff, and calls that should have taken seconds to route instead introduced delays that broke the conversational flow AI agents depend on. Debugging a failed call meant correlating logs across separate telephony and AI layers. No single vendor owned the problem. Neon Health migrated to Telnyx and consolidated onto a single integrated stack where the call, the transcription, the inference, and the speech synthesis all happen in one place.

Beside, an AI-native voice platform, experienced the Frankenstack latency problem at its most extreme. Their original architecture stitched together Twilio for call control, Vonage for SIP trunking, and ElevenLabs for synthesis. Round-trip latency on that stack pushed toward 1200ms. Callers heard dead air. Conversations broke. And when something went wrong, the accountability gap made it impossible to fix. A dropped call meant checking Twilio's logs, then Vonage's, then ElevenLabs', then trying to correlate timestamps across three dashboards. Nobody owned the full call path, so nobody could fix it.

Twilio was also pushing for a $500K commitment while the quality issues remained unresolved. Beside migrated to Telnyx as its single voice and AI platform, displacing Twilio, Vonage, and ElevenLabs entirely, using TeXML as a drop-in replacement for Twilio's TwiML so existing call flows ported over without rewriting application logic.

Cost: When the markup punishes your business model

Twilio is not a carrier. It is an aggregator that routes through intermediaries, and every intermediary takes a margin. For businesses running high-volume messaging or voice, that margin compounds.

Point Blank Political, a full-service political consulting firm, evaluated Twilio for peer-to-peer texting. The verdict was immediate.

"I started looking at Twilio because they were a big name, but they were just overpriced. I wanted to be able to charge my clients a reasonable price for the services we offer to them," said Hunter Lamirande, founder of Point Blank Political.

Point Blank Political partnered with Telnyx and estimates SMS savings of as much as 73% versus Twilio. Telnyx is a true carrier that does not rely on middlemen for core communications functionality, so the per-unit cost reflects actual infrastructure, not aggregated markup. And for a political consultancy whose clients run time-sensitive campaigns, the confidence that comes from carrier-direct delivery matters as much as the price.

"I initially was very concerned about going with a Twilio competitor when it comes to deliverability and customer support, but the fact that Telnyx has a NOC team that offers free support outside of regular business hours is very helpful, so if anything does come up, they're there to help," said Lamirande.

KiwiSat, a prepaid satellite TV provider in Puerto Rico, saw the same pattern. Outbound SMS campaigns hit delivery failures traced back to an aggregated carrier model where messages hop through intermediaries before reaching the end carrier. When a billing reminder fails to reach a prepaid customer, that customer does not pay. When a promotional offer disappears into an aggregator void, the revenue opportunity disappears with it.

On Twilio, the compliance process for 10DLC messaging was slow, and delivery rates on approved campaigns still underperformed. Calls to the sales line kept dropping too. The IVR system suffered from inconsistent routing and latency, with calls sometimes failing to connect to the local carrier at all. In Puerto Rico, where carrier infrastructure is more fragmented than on the mainland, aggregated routing failures compounded. KiwiSat migrated to Telnyx in 2022, displacing Twilio across voice and messaging, and moved to carrier-direct delivery. Because Telnyx operates its own switches rather than routing through aggregator interconnects, calls connected without the latency and jitter that had plagued the IVR.

ImaginationSoft was even more direct. The Puerto Rico government contractor ran on Twilio in its early days. The setup worked for basic outbound campaigns, but as the company took on higher-volume government contracts, the architecture itself became the deeper issue. Twilio provided telephony. Everything else, from SIP routing to messaging deliverability, had to be stitched together from other providers. ImaginationSoft migrated to Telnyx in 2020, displacing Twilio across all workloads and consolidating three separate products onto one platform.

Reliability: When dropped calls are not an option

Some workloads cannot tolerate failure. A missed message in a political campaign can cost an election. A dropped call on a child's smartwatch can leave a family unreachable. A failed voice connection in Brazil can lose a customer entirely.

COSMO builds smartwatches for kids. The product promise is that parents can always reach their child, and the child can always reach them. When cellular coverage was patchy and device connectivity was inconsistent, COSMO needed a connectivity partner who understood that reliability in a child's device is not a feature but a promise. COSMO did explore alternatives like Twilio, but gravitated toward Telnyx for its engagement, responsiveness, and product features.

"Telnyx provided hands-on training and support and helped COSMO bring the solution to market with impressive speed and quality." said COSMO CTO Shil Sondagar.

With Telnyx SIP Trunking for voice calls and IoT SIM cards for cellular connectivity in every smartwatch, COSMO reduced customer complaints about device connectivity and built a brand around a device that parents trust.

Klubi, a Brazilian fintech running AI-driven customer conversations, discovered the same pattern from a different angle. Klubi was running on Twilio, but as the company scaled its voice operations across Brazil, the limitations became clear. Twilio's coverage could not support the geographic reach Klubi required. Brazil's telecom landscape demands carrier-direct relationships and local infrastructure.

An aggregator model that routes through intermediaries in a market with complex interconnection rules means calls fail in regions where the aggregator has no direct presence. Klubi migrated to Telnyx to address the core pain points that drove them away from Twilio: coverage, cost, support, and operational simplicity.

One stack, one bill, one accountable partner

Whether the trigger is latency, cost, reliability, or support, the root cause is the same. Twilio is an aggregator, not an infrastructure owner. It routes through intermediaries, marks up the cost, and depends on third parties for the network layer that determines call quality, message deliverability, and uptime.

Telnyx owns the carrier network, the GPU infrastructure, and the AI platform. That ownership is not an abstraction. It is the reason Ultradoc gets sub-200ms voice AI latency, Point Blank Political saves 73% on SMS, COSMO's smartwatches stay connected, Klubi reaches customers across Brazil, and ImaginationSoft consolidated three vendors into one.

See how easy it is to switch with Telnyx's drop-in TeXML compatibility and carrier-owned infrastructure.