Why Startups and Developers Prefer Prelude: A Case Study With Locket

Locket is a widget that shares live photos from your best friends right to your home screen. They’re used by millions of friends, families, and lovers across the globe. With an outsized social impact supported by a small team, their CTO, Maxi Bustos, is constantly optimizing for scale.

That’s why when SMS verification pains started to strain the business he looked to Prelude for better support, reliability, and growth services.

Building a social app with a small team

"We are a small company supporting millions of users all over the world. So essentially, the challenge is: how do you do more with less? How do you use technologies or tools to make your team as productive as possible so that you can keep the scaling without having to scale the team?

The challenge is prioritization–very effective, very aggressive prioritization. That and then working with partners that don't have layers of bureaucracy. We need to get straight to the real work of getting things working." - Maxi Bustos, CTO at Locket.

The costs of SMS verification (and serving international markets)

As the company grew, so did the SMS verification challenge. This technology is always a burden for startups, but particularly for Locket. Locket serves countries like Vietnam and Saudi Arabia that are particularly vulnerable to SMS-related fraud.

This means that getting SMS verification to people in this country is just flat-out more expensive per SMS, and you have to be increasingly aware of fraud and related incidents that drain team resources. Small teams don’t have the time to work with cumbersome bureaucratic systems every time there’s an issue, there’s a fraud attempt, or something goes wrong.

That’s why Maxi started looking into Prelude. At Prelude, we’re advancing SMS & OTP verification through a set of unified APIs and services built for developers and fast-paced companies.

Better SMS verification, with better support

Prelude is no incumbent. We’re taking years of telco experience and building mobile-first services that suit today’s development needs. Ultimately, Locket uses Prelude because we keep up with startup needs be it customer support that actually responds, reliable services that make growth possible, or the dashboards and reports modern companies need to thrive.

Fast-paced support & setup times

When Maxi looked to explore SMS verification tools and assess costs, he couldn’t get many providers on the phone in the time it took to get setup with Prelude. We’ve built Prelude’s pricing to be competitive if not cheaper than everything else on the market but once you take in the cost of lost days and hours of development time troubleshooting with large organizations… well, that’s why Maxi started testing Prelude in the first place.

“We were trying to reduce SMS costs and at first we tried with other providers but weren’t happy with their response time. The nice thing about Prelude being a small startup is that I get to chat with them on Slack. We got setup in an hour,” Maxi said.

Reliability keeps high-risk markets open

At Prelude, we use algorithm-based optimization that allows us to be more precise in our fraud detection. We stop more fraud, but in addition, we won’t block entire countries or affordable carrier routes if there’s suspicious activity. Instead, we can pinpoint issues to a single number, stop it, and keep more countries and markets enabled.

“We had this situation on a weekend where some country was not enabled for us and the Prelude team enabled it five minutes later. With a larger partner would have been a ticket and someone would triage that, and three hours later someone would resign, and two days later you get an answer. It’s frustrating. Not having to deal with that is an important asset.”

Built for Developers

The Locket team was able to understand and get setup with Prelude’s API within a day. In addition, they regularly check in on dashboards and reports to look at per country prices and assesses how well their costs are scaling with growth.

“Time is an opportunity cost for us so we move really fast. We like to partner with companies who are in the same boat. Prelude is easy to use, the API is great, the dashboard is nice and I can see reports.”