Clickatell has Announced Today that it will Discontinue its Free SMS Service for Websites on Friday, 30 March 2001
March 28, 2001 The move has long been expected and is congruent to the global trend of moving away from free services in general. Clickatell says it's unfortunate that the free service will be terminated at this stage, but the success of the business has driven the volumes to high numbers. "We need to focus on providing the best possible service for our paying clients," says Danie du Toit, Marketing Director of Clickatell. "The free service was beginning to impact on the paid services, like Clickatell-Custom, Clickalert and Clickatell-API. The positive side of terminating the free service is that we can service our paying clients so much better now." Clickatell had launched in November 2000 with the free messenger service as their flagship product. Within a few months they had signed up almost 25,000 international web sites as clients, sending in excess of 3,5 million messages per month - just with the free product. The company is run out of Cape Town, South Africa, and has grown to be known as the SMS provider on the Internet with the largest global coverage. Clickatell is continually expanding the number of countries it can send to, currently covering networks in over 168 countries. The new move also leaves them with the possibility of accelerating their financial growth to reach their targets much earlier than they had initially expected. Clickatell saw the free offering as a branding platform, which was meant to act as a springboard for their further product releases. According to Clickatell this has worked very well, with the number of requests that they are getting each day for their different products growing continually. Clickatell is nearing the completion of their first phase of their business, leading on to integrating further solutions for their product suite.
|
Press Contact
USA:
Kelly Brieger
US: +1 650 704 1748
EMEA:
Nicola Hunt
SA: +27 21 910 7700
Email: press@clickatell.com
|
