MessageBird is now Bird. 

But it’s not just our name that’s changing — our pricing is too, and we’re launching a whole range of new products to provide you with more value for a much lower price.

We don’t believe in profiting off consumers. 

Unfortunately, this isn’t the standard in the market. And companies with non-transparent pricing models charge artificially high markups, passing the cost on to you and pocketing the profit.

We don’t think that’s fair. So we’re setting things straight.

We’ve always invested heavily in our infrastructure and efficiency to deliver your messages at the lowest possible cost. And with today’s product launch, we’re going one step further.

Our new messaging APIs allow us to charge SMS at a 90% discount. No markups, no hidden fees.

That means if you spend $100k on SMS with a company like Twilio, you’ll only spend $10k with Bird.

But that’s not all…

Say hello to Bird CRM

Bird CRM marks our next chapter in marketing, sales, and payments. 🚀

We’re dropping costs here, too. If you’re currently spending 100k on email with a company like Klaviyo or Attentive, you’ll save 40% on Email and 90% on SMS with Bird, too.

Tell me Why?

In 2011 Bob, Rene, Ihab, Adriaan and I founded MessageBird as a deep tech telecoms company, abstracting away the complexity of legacy carrier infrastructure to simple API’s our customers could use to send messages. 

Few people realise how far we went, re-building SS7 from scratch, getting our own Mobile Network Codes and even getting satellite connections for SCCP signalling.  While initially as a wholesaler (fun fact Twilio went international on our carrier network) expanding quickly to developers and businesses. 

We were lucky. Every app in the world was verifying users through SMS codes and we happened to have built the strongest and largest international network for Faster and Cheaper deliverability. One could call it an unfair advantage. 

In 2016 after bootstrapping for 5 years we joined Y-Combinator and had YC join our cap table as the first outside investor. Till this day, that experience was the most impactful few months of my life. Everything changed after that. Going in with an API for SMS, Voice and Chat messages - I left feeling the need to change the world. It was also the first time Twilio tried to acquire us, I’ll never forget $200m written down as the offer. Twilio was worth $2.2B at the time.

I'm sharing this because it illustrates the crazy 13 years we’ve had since. Denying multiple acquisition offers from $200m to $2B, and the relentless tenacity the team continued to have in pursuit of realising our singular vision: the ability to talk to a business the way you talk to your friends. 

It made so much sense to us, people are on channels (whatsapp, text, voice) and they don’t want to be on-hold. They want instant access to a business, whether it’s to buy a product or get help. 

So here we are. 

Today, we are declaring death to the aggregation business on top of global carrier networks by democratising access and taking our margins to zero. 

Or, as Jeff Bezos famously said in 1999: “Your margins are my opportunity”. 

It is no longer about the abstraction layer of API’s. AI changed the game and flipped everything - the next 10 years will be all about infrastructure + application - or how we like to look at it : what you can do with the channel versus merely access to the channel. 

The Big White Lie 

The big white lie of the entire CPaaS API’s is that it’s not about the developer at all. I don’t know a single customer who would not rather have something just work out of the box versus having to invest endless engineering time to build. It is extremely inconvenient to have to build and maintain use cases on top of channels and most importantly impossible to ever get to the infamous customer 360. 

Why Bird CRM? 

All communications between businesses happens over channels - whether it be calling, texting, WhatsApp or iMessage - and all these interactions create a customer contact. From there, every business uses endless tooling to manage the customer relationship, whether it be to encourage them to buy more or simply to support them. 

But what if all this can be done from one tool? 

What if the channel didn’t matter when it came to selling or servicing your customers? What if payment data was fully integrated with your other customer data? And what if you could just log into one tool and it just works?

Today, marks Day 1, our first iteration of BirdCRM and while we still have lots to do - we hope you will enjoy some of the magic and help us realise our dream: 

Making Talking to a business as easy as talking to your friends. 

Best from Amsterdam, 

Robert