Why use Sendbird chat vs. building with free platforms

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Reduce time to market: Starting with basic chat functionality with low volume of users is simple enough. But very quickly end users will ask for more: typing indicators, online presence, delivery receipts, automatic translation, attachments, gifs, moderation, analytics, support for different types of phones, and the list goes on. Every time you add functionality it’ll take your development team significant time and effort.

Manage costs: Over time the total cost of ownership is much cheaper with Sendbird than building from open source frameworks. Even if you use a ‘free’ open source framework, your costs include not just the initial development cost, but cost of adding new features, maintaining the stability of the back end, and the cost of servers.

Reduce risk: Chat is difficult to build & maintain especially when volumes get high. But a slow or buggy chat experience reflects poorly on your brand and can lead to reduced engagement or churn. Why take that risk of trying to solve a hard problem on your own especially if chat is not your core competency?

Opportunity cost of developer time: Is chat the best use of developer time? Are there more important things those same engineers could be building that are more central to your business and lead to competitive differentiation?    

Focus on the core: Our customers are not in the business of chat. They are in a broad range of verticals, such as dating, food delivery or entertainment. Building chat is hard, especially at scale. Building chat in house takes resources away from building features more central to the company's mission. Every developer at a food delivery company building chat is not working on routing algorithms, or onboarding experiments.