Alerts and notifications

Inform, engage, and drive customers to take action with personalized email. phone, and text notifications that are reliably delivered through Twilio.

Free trial
No credit card required
Flexible pricing
Woman smiling at her phone with shopping notifications and package tracking details
Woman smiling at her phone with shopping notifications and package tracking details

What you can do with Twilio alerts and notifications

Deliver important information on the channels your customers prefer.

  • Chat bubble with clock

    Set up time-based appointment reminder emails or text notifications to reduce no-shows.

  • Earth with a chat bubble icon

    Send bulk text messages, like flight notifications or terms of service changes, to alert customers at scale.

  • Package with heart

    Purchase confirmation

    Send receipts and automated order updates such as delivery notifications.

  • Mobile phone with user and heart symbol

    Set up text alerts or triggered emails to deliver a notification when a new lead comes in.

  • Chat Bubble

    Product notifications

    Intelligently route leads to the right agent or sales rep based on skills, location, and availability.

  • Mobile notification

    Security alerts

    Notify customers with real-time account alerts about large withdrawals or suspicious activity.

How to build email, phone, and text alerts

Create the exact notification solution you need. No limitations. No need for multiple vendors.

Flowchart of notification process using Twilio API from trigger to delivery confirmation.
Flowchart of notification process using Twilio API from trigger to delivery confirmation.

Twilio products for alerts and notifications

Choose the best communication channels for your alerts and notifications use cases.

Feature

Programmable Messaging API

Twilio Sendgrid Email API

Voice API

Free trial
No credit card required

Multichannel

SMS, WhatsApp, Push, MMS

Email

Voice

Phone number selection

A2P 10DLC, short codes, toll-free, alphanumeric

-

A2P 10DLC, short codes, toll-free, alphanumeric

Easy to build

Send a text with a few lines of code

Integrate in minutes

Make an outbound call in minutes

Real-time delivery

75 second traffic re-route cycle and +3% in messages delivered3

12% greater email deliverability rate vs. industry avg.

3 redundant regions, 8 low-latency edge locations

Personalization

Content API to send templated rich content across channels

HTML Editor with support for Dynamic Content

IVR virtual agents trained on customer data

Scalable

157B+ messages sent or received per year

1.7T+ emails sent per year

36.5B+ voice calls per year

Security and trust

Enhanced verification with Trust Hub

Sender Authentication (SPF, DKIM, rDNS)

Verified calling with Trust Hub

Performance data

Insights dashboard

Deliverability Insights, Searchable Email Activity4

Voice Intelligence

Pricing
Flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing

Starts at $0.0083/SMS

Starts at $19.95/mo

Starts at $0.014/min

Learn more

Send your first notifications in minutes

Sign up for a free Twilio account to start building email alerts and text notifications today. Use our quickstarts, up-to-date docs, the Twilio CLI, and Code Exchange to build a prototype quickly.

# Download the helper library from https://www.twilio.com/docs/python/install
import os
from twilio.rest import Client


# Find your Account SID and Auth Token at twilio.com/console
# and set the environment variables. See http://twil.io/secure
account_sid = os.environ['TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID']
auth_token = os.environ['TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN']
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)

call = client.calls.create(
                        url='http://demo.twilio.com/docs/voice.xml',
                        to='+14155551212',
                        from_='+15017122661'
                    )

print(call.sid)

Send your first text alerts

Watch the quickstart to learn how to send your first text notifications with Twilio Programmable Messaging.

Send your first email notifications

Set up your SendGrid account and start sending transactional email with help from our onboarding guide.

Make your first notification call

Start making outbound calls through the Voice APIs with our docs and quickstarts in 7+ languages.

Prefer not to code? No problem.

Work with one of our trusted partners to get coding support or explore a pre-built notifications solution. Find a partner

Why choose Twilio for alerts and notifications

Dependable delivery for email, voice, and text notifications at any scale, anywhere in the world.

Smiling couple looking at a smartphone while sitting outdoors.
Smiling couple looking at a smartphone while sitting outdoors.

Don’t leave customers waiting for messages that are delayed or undelivered. Twilio has a resilient, regionalized infrastructure, intelligent scaling, and unrivaled global connectivity and network quality.

99.9% uptime
monthly average for the Twilio platform

Quickly integrate Twilio APIs with your existing systems, customized logic, and emerging AI. Scale up for important events and use advanced notification management to power content personalization.

49% of brands
Are prioritizing additional communication channels to meet customer expectations in 20245

Simplify your notifications strategy with one provider for any notification you send (from product-triggered messages to delivery updates) with personalized content across the channels your customers prefer.

66% of consumers
say they will quit a brand if their experience isn’t personalized5

Twilio Messaging Engagement Suite

Get simpler development, quicker time to market, and higher deliverability rates.** See how Message Scheduling, Link Shortening with Click Tracking, advanced data, and real-time dashboards can benefit your business. 

FAQs

Some of the most common types of alerts and notifications you can send with Twilio are appointment reminders, mass notifications, emergency alerts, purchase confirmations, security notifications, product notifications, delivery notifications, and account updates — but there are so many more.

Any time you need to send an alert or notification to someone over email, voice call, or text message (be it SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, Push, Apple Messages for Business, or Facebook Messenger), Twilio is ready to deliver.

You don’t have to be a developer to use Twilio, but it helps. Twilio was built for developers and offers APIs and code libraries you can use to set up custom notification solutions. This developer-first approach provides more flexibility to fully tailor alerts and notifications and integrate with other systems vs. a pre-built solution that can be rigid and limiting.

However, you can still use Twilio to send alerts and notifications even if you’re not a developer! We believe everyone is a builder and we also have sample apps, low-code, and no-code tools. We’ve also built out a network of partners who offer pre-built solutions or custom solutions that sit on top of Twilio’s infrastructure.

 

Twilio has battle-tested infrastructure for sending alerts and notifications at incredible scale, reliably, around the world. Our platform handled over 262 billion messages, 2.4 trillion emails, and 38 billion voice calls last year and reaches more than 180 countries. We’re always investing in our channel offerings to give customers the best, broadest reach to connect with their customers.

We have the distinct advantage of sending traffic over our Super Network, a global network of Tier-1 carriers with access to over 4,800 carrier connections. This gives our customers world-class connectivity with redundancy and fall-back routes. 

And because we built the foundation that supports all these global communications, we know that compliance is complicated. So we make it as easy as possible for our customers to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. 

All of these investments in reliable infrastructure, platform security, developer experience, and trusted communications make Twilio the easy choice for a partner for sending alerts and notifications.

 

A simple app that sends SMS alerts, text notifications, or email alerts can be set up in as little as 30 minutes in the Twilio Console. If you’re connecting your alerts with another system like Zapier or Salesforce, or building a more complex notification system, you might need to spend a couple of hours getting it up and running.

The cost of your alerts and notifications solution is calculated based on: the type of message you send (text vs. WhatsApp, email vs. phone call, etc), the number of messages you send, the country you send to and from, applicable carrier fees, and message types. 

There isn’t a standard price because Twilio communications operate on a usage-based model. To get the most accurate estimate, view our pricing. But to get a rough idea of costs, here’s a basic breakdown by channel:

  • SMS pricing in the U.S. starts at $0.0083 per outbound message sent to a U.S. long code

  • RCS Rich pricing starts at $0.0083 per outbound message in the U.S. 

  • WhatsApp pricing starts at $0.0084 per message for a utility template 

  • Email plans start at $19.95 per month to send 50,000-100,000 emails per month

  • Voice call pricing starts at $0.0140 per minute to make calls to a local number in the U.S.

1. In the U.S. with a verified toll-free number. Exact message total depends on your location and number type.
2. To make local or toll-free calls in the U.S.
3. The Total Economic Impact™ of Twilio Messaging, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, April 2023. Results are for a composite organization representative of interviewed customers.
4. Only available for some Email packages.
5. Twilio State of Customer Engagement Report 2024
** In an evaluation of more than 63M messages sent through Twilio with shortened hyperlinks, messages with shortened hyperlinks by 3rd party Link Shorteners were filtered at 1.96% or 28x the rate of Twilio which was filtered at a rate of 0.07%

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