By Simon Woodhead
TLDR: Send us your CDRs from any other provider and we’ll give you a matrix showing what we’d have charged across all our pricing tiers!
Why?
Simwood has never competed on price. We don’t do ‘special best price’ deals but instead offer a choice of rate decks that suit all customers, and set the rates within them using a consistent model. We think this is fair, transparent, and the model reflects what we need to operate at each level.
We’re blessed that most customers get this and appreciate the absence of the need/opportunity to haggle. We don’t add stealth charges either like ‘me too’ so things like ‘fax-to-email’ remains free as it costs us no more to operate than delivering a call by SIP – others think it is appropriate to charge £5 or more a month at “wholesale” for this kind of thing. Maybe that is us missing a trick, but it feels honest.
Of course, there are huge intangibles in dealing with Simwood too, like our levels of support, reliable architecture, rich API, and fraud controls. Newer customers seem to be liking the fact we care about privacy, have actually done something towards GDPR, and have long supported encryption! In fact we’ve written the book on many of these topics!
Those who get this love one or all of those things and we’ve had some lovely emails to that effect lately. We even had one customer previously price buying who noticed such a reduction in is own support through using Simwood over two large incumbent carriers that he ceased to care about the price.
Now, this is all well and good where the decision maker is the one aware of us. Sadly though, we see increasing instances where a recommendation to use Simwood is made, but internal approvers such as the CFO get involved. At this stage, we’re often compared on straight price, usually per minute for the top few destinations, with all our own values ignored, and the absence of stealth charges lost in the detail. There’s a load of other detail lost here too given the granularity of our breakouts. We might have 5 or 6 breakouts for different mobile operators in a country at varying rates whilst others likely just have one at a blended rate. The headline rate for a country is less likely to be the one applied through Simwood than through someone with a less granular deck, so a naive comparison that isn’t call-by-call with longest prefix matching will be wrong and cast us in a disadvantaged light.
Many of these are resolved by educating the CFO on what they’re missing (something I take personal pleasure in getting involved in!), but we don’t always get the opportunity and some are harder work than others!
So to resolve this, and help Simwood-champions overcome the issues involved, we’ve built a tool that will consume CDRs from other operators and return a spreadsheet showing breakout by breakout what Simwood would have charged for those calls across all our rate decks. This can give objective data to support any case to move to Simwood, or upgrade service level, so we can all be dealing with facts.
If you’re a customer with traffic elsewhere, or considering joining Simwood, please send us your CDRs and we’ll get back to you! Also, don’t forget, our open invitation to spend time in Bristol with us and our technical resources to review or design your own architecture!
