How buycycle Cut Verification Costs by 30% and Raised Signup Verification From 70% to 83% With Prelude

A European C2C marketplace for used bikes cut the cost of SMS pumping to effectively zero and lowered overall verification costs, with a three-day integration

Rowan Haddad

Content & SEO Manager

Summary

buycycle switched from Twilio to Prelude for phone verification, cutting costs by roughly 30% while raising signup verification rates from 70% to 82–83% and bringing SMS pumping spend down close to nothing. The integration took three days. buycycle is now expanding its use of Prelude by adopting Watch, to bring additional fraud signals into the same platform that already handles verification.

Founded five years ago out of a personal need, buycycle connects cyclists across Europe and the US to buy and sell used bikes and gear, private to private. Buyers and sellers transact directly, and buycycle organizes shipping and handles escrow payments: packaging material goes out to the seller, the bike gets picked up and shipped to the buyer, and the seller is only paid out once the buyer confirms the bike arrived as described.

With a high average order value, trust and safety sit at the center of how buycycle operates and why verification starts before an account can even message anyone.

That's when buycycle found Prelude.

We spoke with Jonas Jaeger, Co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering at buycycle, about the switch from Twilio to Prelude and what it's meant for the platform.

The Challenge: High-Value Transactions Need a Trusted, Low-Friction Signup

As a marketplace built for athletes buying and selling premium gear worldwide, buycycle wants signing up, browsing, and listing a bike to be effortless, but with average order values around €2,000, the platform also needs strong assurance that the people behind each account are who they say they are. As Jonas put it, verifying a phone number alongside an email address is the first, most basic barrier: it makes it harder for bad actors to create accounts and message other users, while keeping the door open for legitimate buyers and sellers.

That combination of high trust and low friction is exactly where buycycle's previous SMS verification provider, Twilio, fell short. Twilio was costly, and buycycle had no reliable way to stop SMS pumping (automated attempts to run traffic through large numbers of phone numbers). Because that pumping protection didn't work, buycycle ended up paying for it twice: once for the ineffective protection itself, and again for the extra SMS volume it failed to catch.

Catching fraud earlier, rather than dealing with the fallout afterward, is central to how Jonas thinks about cost as well:

"Everything that you can weed out before is good. You want to sort as many bad actors out as early as possible. But it's never going to be 100% bulletproof, so I still believe you need different tiers of verification."

The stakes of getting this wrong are higher than on a typical marketplace, which is why payment isn't released to a seller until the buyer confirms everything checks out.

"We had to set up our own sets of business rules to pre-vet users before we made the call to Twilio. And even then, it blocked legitimate users while doing little against automated SMS traffic. It was the worst combination of both."

For a marketplace where trust and safety is a top priority, Jonas and his team went looking for a verification provider that could deliver stronger fraud protection and reliable message deliverability, with cost efficiency as the natural next benefit rather than the starting point.

Choosing Prelude: Live in Three Days

Integrating Prelude was, in Jonas's words, simple.

"It was very easy. Prelude has good documentation. It's essentially one API call, and that's it. It took us three days to switch."

The team ran through risk settings for each of their markets, and by day three, the new flow was live everywhere. Asked what he'd tell another high-value marketplace evaluating Prelude, Jonas didn't hesitate:

"I would say do it. It's easy to integrate, it's cheap, and it just works out of the box. It worked from hour one."

As a first layer of defense against fraud, Jonas has been unequivocal about the results:

"As a first barrier, Prelude Verify is doing a fantastic job."

Beyond the product itself, Jonas highlighted the responsiveness of Prelude's team throughout the switch:

"From the start, the support team has been very responsive... we have a Slack channel with them, and they usually answer within minutes. So I'm super happy with the support."

The Results: Lower Costs, Higher Verification Rates, SMS Pumping Spend Down to Near Zero

A few months in, the numbers speak for themselves:

~30% reduction in operational costs compared to the previous setup
Signup verification rate up from 70% to 82–83%, consistently across every European market buycycle operates in
SMS pumping spend down to close to nothing
Stronger fraud filtering, with less operational overhead

Jonas is blunt about the impact:

"Verification rate went up, cost went down, and false positives went down too. All the metrics we wanted to see improved in the right direction."

Because buying a bike is a considered purchase rather than an impulse one, buycycle's overall end-to-end conversion held steady but the signup step itself got noticeably smoother, with fewer legitimate users caught up in unnecessary friction.

On top of that, the experience for buycycle's users has stayed smooth with no complaints about missing codes, long waits, or a clunky signup.

"We don't see any complaints now, like people saying 'I didn't get the SMS' or 'I was waiting forever.' It's very fast. They receive the code, and they're verified."

Jonas already sees how buycycle can leverage Prelude to go further:

"We haven't even gone for silent verification and verification through WhatsApp. I think that's going to decrease costs further, because of lower SMS volume."

Looking Ahead: Expanding into Watch

Trust and safety at buycycle doesn't stop at signup. It's an ongoing priority given how much is riding on every transaction. With verification in place, the team is now expanding its use of Prelude by adopting Watch to bring in additional fraud signals and other patterns that verification alone can’t fully see.

Jonas sees real value in bringing verification and fraud signal detection closer together on a single platform, rather than piecing together results from separate tools and dashboards: fewer places to look, clearer data, less room for things to fall between the cracks.

It's a natural next step, in that same spirit, for buycycle to keep consolidating tools onto a single platform, and Jonas expects the shift to pay off in more than just clarity.

"Hopefully, by combining everything into one, going forward it gets even more efficient and more cost-effective. The more we can pull forward by combining Watch and Verify, the better."

buycycle's experience shows what a unified, well-supported verification and fraud platform can do for a high-value marketplace.

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