That’s because there’s also a monthly free allowance.Įven aside from the free credits, Google gives a free allowance every month. We’d spent $0.00 (including promotional credits) at the end of a month of testing. You get a free trial which lasts up to a year, and it includes $300 of promotional credits, so it’ll spend that before it spends your money.
Twilio chatbot full#
Google shares full pricing details here, but the important things to know about are: So, assuming you have 2,500 text orders a month and each order takes about five text messages, it’s coming to about $100 a month in total. It’ll cost about $0.0075 to send and receive texts, and Twilio Studio - which we use to do a lot of the “conversation” - costs $0.01 every time it’s activated (the first 1,000 every month are free). Local Twilio phone numbers cost about $1.00 per month. When you're just starting on this, or when you’ve made a change (like adding new functionality or new businesses), make sure you check back in on your credits over the next few weeks so you know what’s going on. This should all run pretty cheaply - I’m talking like four cents an order.Įven so, always make sure that any pricing alerts are coming through to an email address you actively monitor. If you’re coming back to this post, or just need help with one area, feel free to jump to the specific part you’re interested in:
Twilio chatbot how to#
I’ll take you through each of these components in turn and tell you how to work with them. We have a sheet which lists all of the businesses using our chatbot, and linking off to the individual Google Sheets for each business.
Twilio chatbot code#
Google Cloud Functions (semi-free): when a URL is called it runs code (including updating our database for the restaurant) and returns a response.Twilio (paid): supplies the phone number and handles most of the conversational back-and-forth.The solution we agreed on had three parts:
Twilio chatbot update#
Alex had found my 2017 post (holy moly, content marketing works!) and asked if I could help his team build a chatbot. This effort began by focusing on restaurants. Alex had launched “a non-profit effort to help the local small business owners navigate these challenging times, save as many jobs as possible, and continue to serve our community while helping to flatten the curve.” This April, I got an email from a man named Alexandre Silvestre. In September 2017, as one of my first big passion projects at Distilled, I wrote a Moz blog post telling people how to make a chatbot and giving away some example code. Plus, that business will be able to manage key details (like incoming orders and a menu) by simply updating a Google Sheet, making all of this far more accessible than most other options. Once the system is set up, there will be no coding necessary to create a new SMS-based chatbot for a new business. The example here is set up to work with restaurants, but could be adapted to work with any business that needs to receive orders, check them against inventory/menus, and note them down to be fulfilled. In this post, I give you instructions and code to produce not just one, but a series of text-based chatbots that can be managed by Google Sheets. If you’re a marketer looking for work, adding this to your list of skills could mean you keep things ticking along while many of the usual doors are closed - or that you open new doors. If you’re working for a company (or client) that's in trouble, the use of SMS chatbots could be a way for you to look outside your normal list of solutions and help them succeed in a completely different way. Many of us are helping businesses that are facing hard times, or we’re facing hard times ourselves.
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