How Choose gained control over SMS verification with Prelude

Choose is an innovative e-commerce platform that showcases emerging brands for a clientele seeking trendy and environmentally conscious products, by dropping new deals daily. With a growing community of 250,000 daily users, Choose connects a predominantly French clientele to brands that resonate with their values.

The Challenge: Lack of control over their user verification performance and costs

As the CTO of Choose, Thibaut aims to ensure scalability while effectively managing costs. With Choose experiencing rapid growth, he faced the need for a reliable SMS provider to support this expansion, particularly for user verification via OTP messages during sign-ups and within their referral program. However, they encountered multiple challenges with their previous provider, Google Firebase.

As the Choose user base grew, so did their user verification costs. For a long time Thibaut had been attempting to benefit from more competitive volume-based pricing with Firebase. Despite numerous attempts to reach someone at Google, he was met with consistent refusals regarding better pricing options. 

The Choose team also found the lack of analytics and the opaque nature of their previous provider frustrating.

"We had no insight into why messages weren’t being received and we were left digging through data on our own with inadequate tools. We realized we couldn’t scale effectively with Firebase."

A significant turning point came when a major disruption affected their service, locking users out of the platform for an entire weekend. This outage coincided with a critical marketing campaign, resulting in wasted budget and missed opportunities.

"Firebase mistakenly identified our users as spam, completely blocking SMS delivery during a crucial marketing operation. This was particularly devastating as we had planned important marketing operations and were onboarding many new users. The lack of support and transparency from their team made it clear we were losing control over our SMS communications."

This lack of control over costs and service effectiveness prompted Thibaut to seek an alternative, leading him to discover Prelude. After a quick trial, he was impressed with the performance and ease of integration.

"We restructured our infrastructure swiftly, and within five days, Prelude was live. We were thrilled with the results."

The Solution: Reducing costs while improving user conversions with Prelude

Switching to Prelude provided Choose with several key benefits. 

Better transparency

Prelude’s analytics dashboard has proven to be a useful tool for Choose.

The dashboard offers users a comprehensive overview of budget allocation and key performance indicators, including SMS conversion rates, authentication volumes, and conversion times. 

If any troubleshooting is required, the team can easily access detailed authentication records and history.

"I check our analytics dashboard once per week. It’s well-designed and offers a wealth of information. But as long as we don’t receive alerts, we can let Prelude run smoothly in the background."

Responsive support

The Choose and Prelude teams collaborate through a shared Slack channel, enabling instant communication for any questions or issues that may arise. The Prelude support team proactively notifies Choose whenever they identify potential concerns.

Customer support is a top priority at Prelude, especially considering the sensitivity of user verification. In situations where users might be locked out, prompt assistance is crucial. That's why all clients have access to support via Slack, email, or phone.

“Whenever there's a problem, the Prelude team reaches out or we write to them, and they get back to us very quickly. Their team is friendly and responsive, providing the support we need, in contrast to more traditional providers, where responses can often be slow and unhelpful.”

Saving on user verification costs

Finally, Prelude helped Choose reduce their SMS verification budget by 25%. 

Prelude’s API connects Choose to over 30 local and global providers, offering access to more than 1,000 routes across 230 countries. Our API automatically identifies the most cost-effective option for each OTP request, ensuring Choose’s users consistently receive their messages while enabling the Choose team to benefit from competitive pricing.

We negotiate pricing with providers on behalf of our clients. As we onboard new companies and increase our overall volume, we're able to lower costs for our entire customer base. Additionally, because we don’t impose margins on message costs, our routing remains unbiased—ensuring we always select the best route based on price and performance.

"Prelude not only costs less but also takes care of routing messages efficiently, always choosing the most cost-effective and effective paths."

By addressing all the pain points Choose encountered with their previous provider, Arnaud now has full confidence that Prelude can support his scalability goals while effectively managing user verification costs.

"If you need to send SMS, use Prelude. They're the most affordable option and I’d recommend it to everyone. With Prelude, we have complete control over our SMS communications, which is vital for our customer verification processes, especially during the sign-up and referral validation stages. I’d give them a solid 10/10."