The metered balance is used to maintain the use of the Phone, Call (Power Dialer), SMS, and Call Recording services in Uptics. These charges are in addition to your subscription plan.
Phone Number
You can purchase a Twilio Phone Number within Uptics under Profile > Settings > Email & Phone > Phone & SMS Setting > Phone Numbers. The Twilio Pricing for phone numbers varies by Country, type of phone number (local or toll-free) and will be shown while purchasing the same. Read more on the Twilio Phone Number Pricing.
If you have a personal phone number in other geographies, you can connect it for Outbound calling, but we currently have US, Canada, and UK for purchasing numbers in the Uptics platform for using the Outbound, Inbound, and SMS features.
Note: If you add a personal number, Twilio rates still apply and you can make outbound calls, but you will not be able to send or receive SMS messages or receive Inbound calls. This is only functional with a Twilio Number.
Twilio Outbound & Inbound Calling Charges
For the Twilio Calling Charges, rates are determined by the amounts listed on Twilio's Voice Pricing page, and this varies by Country, type of phone number (local or toll-free), and type of action (inbound/outbound), etc. We charge 5% on top of those rates for service and processing fees. For example, if a US phone number is $1.00 per month, our rate would be $1.05.
Twilio Outbound & Inbound SMS Charges
For the Twilio SMS Charges, rates are determined by the amounts listed on Twilio's SMS Pricing page, and this varies by Country where you're sending SMS messages to, type of phone number (local or toll-free), type of action (inbound/outbound), etc. If it's US to US, it's $0.008 per SMS. Currently, our integration is native, but we'll be looking into allowing users to connect their existing Twilio accounts in the future. We charge 5% on top of those rates for service and processing fees.
Call Recordings
For Twilio Call Recordings Charges, the first 10,000 minutes of storage per month are free. Each recording minute above 10,000 will be charged $0.0005 per minute, per month. Subaccounts do not get additional storage. You can refer to the Twilio Call Recordings Pricing details page to understand in-depth how Twilio charges for Call Recordings.