> rather than using a service like Pager Duty or other, more appropriate means

What does PagerDuty do that makes things more appropriate? I would generally expect a middleman service to make things worse.

They can just use twilio like every other business that need's sms....

There’s been a leading theory that Twilio has turned a big blind eye to misuse of the their platform for sending spam. They have all these clauses, rules etc sure; they make a good show of it, but they are really slow for example to close loopholes, if at all. They’ve done a good job of making the whole thing look like they take it seriously while being clever enough to leave loopholes and obvious workarounds to anyone who knows where to look

Or so the theory goes

Drop a decent enough spend and they will look away for a while. Open an account with a burner gmail and test out the api using free credits - shut down within the hour.

IMO sms costs are extortion. It should be an open standard with standard interfaces and cost the same as email, which is to say be basically free.

There isn’t really any reason why it can’t be that I can think of

“But we want to send text messages for free!”