Must-know facts about Sendbird: A leading communications API platform

What is Sendbird?

Sendbird is a communications API platform that allows product & engineering leaders to quickly and easily embed notifications, chat, calls, and live streaming into their web and mobile applications. Sendbird began serving large-scale gaming and social media businesses, and then expanded to food delivery, healthcare, and financial service organizations around the world.

Does Sendbird charge per message?

Sendbird’s pricing model depends on the product. Sendbird Chat does not charge per chat message, but charges based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAU) and peak concurrent connections. This assumes a percentage of the total monthly active users are actively chatting at the same time - a.k.a. “peak concurrent connections” or PCC. Sendbird Calls (voice and video) and Live (live streaming) charge a rate per minute per user. Sendbird’s new, low-code Notifications product is for businesses to reach their user base en masse with one-way messages, and charges based on volume tiers to match the use case.

Does Sendbird charge for offline messaging?

Sendbird’s local caching feature for offline messaging is free and included in all chat plans at no additional charge. The local cache functionality is fully integrated into our SDKs/UIKits and is easy to use without needing a separate plug-in library.

Does Sendbird have a free plan?

Sendbird offers a free Developer plan. The Developer plan gives access to all the platform chat features of Sendbird with a limitation of 100 monthly active users and 10 concurrent peak connections (PCC). The plan is perfect for ongoing testing, MVPs, or hobbyists’ needs.

Does Sendbird have a startup plan?

Sendbird offers a Starter plan for businesses starting at 5,000 monthly active users starting at $399 per month. Sendbird Starter plan includes the most advanced messaging features, basic moderation controls, and analytics, plus all integration features. Learn more about our pricing plans.

Are Sendbird’s voice and video APIs integrated with chat?

Sendbird engineers created Sendbird Calls from the ground up after acquiring Roundee in early 2020. Calls is a fully featured, standalone voice and video product that is highly integrated into the Sendbird Chat user experience. Sendbird Chat and Sendbird Calls share the same user IDs, user base, and dashboard, allowing for one single administration approach to manage a Sendbird application that uses both Chat and Calls. Sendbird Calls includes a React Native SDK, and Sendbird Live has 3 UIKits that integrate chat and moderation with live video streaming out of the box.

How does Sendbird manage data export?

Sendbird offers backend functions to export data. Sendbird provides APIs and webhooks to request a data export in CSV and JSON format programmatically. For Enterprise customers, Sendbird delivers the ability to perform data exports right from the dashboard.

Starter or Pro customers who would like access to download their data can reach out to Senbird's Technical Services team for live support with this. Starter and Pro plan customers can download data once per year, free of charge.

What is Sendbird’s policy regarding data storage and retention time?

Sendbird data storage and retention time have a default setup value but are not limited. We provide a generous baseline of 10G of monthly data with six-month data retention. The storage amount and retention periods for Enterprise customers can be extended indefinitely for an additional fee covering the cost of the service.

What are Sendbird’s pre- and post-sales support services?

Sendbird has a world-class support team deployed globally consisting of Sales Engineers who guide customers during the evaluation phase and proof of concept, and Solution Architects then work to provide rapid onboarding and implementation experiences to accelerate time to market. Sendbird also offers a dedicated account manager, customer success manager, and technical support team to help customers throughout their entire journey.
Sendbird has a long history of servicing enterprise-level companies for which the chat experience is core, including Yahoo, Patreon, Teladoc, Paytm, Coupang, Hinge, PicPay, and many more. Sendbird’s customer support culture is firmly ingrained in servicing enterprise-level expectations from our early days of proving our scalability and reliability.

Sendbird is so much more than communication APIs

Customers choose Sendbird as a long-term partner they can trust and rely on to support their evolving needs. The Sendbird team is committed to providing our customers with reliable, trustworthy, and fact-based information about our platform and services. We believe in giving you the knowledge you need to make informed decisions that align with your business goals.

When evaluating communications API vendors, we recommend that you carefully fact-check the claims by doing the following:

• Ask to interview multiple customer references

• Ask for customer proof when it comes to scalability and reliability. Do not make decisions based on simulations and pre-production testing.

• Ask for a deeper level of data showing retention and CSAT scores. (World class benchmarks are 84% customer retention, 110% net revenue retention, and 85% for CSAT)

• Ask to speak with their customer success and technical support teams to ensure you'll be successful after the contract signature

Connect with us to learn more about our products and services. We offer competitive prices - just ask us! Our experts are happy to help.