What is Ribbit?

Ribbit is an open platform for communication innovation. Unlike any other phone company, we give our global community of developers unprecedented access to our technology through the Ribbit API set, allowing them to innovate at will–without any prior knowledge of telephony. We believe it's this community of developers–more than 20,000 and growing–that will create the next generation of communications solutions, adding interactive voice and messaging to Websites, online communities, and software applications. To that end Ribbit freely offers tools, code, tutorials, forums, how-to videos, and documentation to continually support its developer community.

Ribbit is also a software-as-a-service provider. Ribbit Mobile and Ribbit for CRM (Salesforce and Oracle) are examples of commercial applications built on the Ribbit Platform, aimed at consumers and mobile business users respectively (and available through telecommunications carriers as an integrated service). Ribbit offers its platform as a service to telecommunications carriers through its Bring Your Own Network (BYON) program, giving carriers a way to quickly take advantage of shifts in customer demand while increasing incremental revenues.

What's the big deal? Why is this important?

With voice and data networks starting to merge, consumers, businesses, software developers, and even traditional telecommunications carriers are exploring new ways to communicate, and new ways to manage their multiple communication streams. The challenge is that the ways in which we most commonly communicate–voice, text, email, IM–exist in largely separate, "online" and "offline" worlds today.

Ribbit was created to break down the barriers between these two worlds, enabling communications to flow freely across all networks and devices and creating a better informed, more manageable, and more connected world–while laying the foundation for a new generation of telephony innovation.

So what does this mean for developers?

The Ribbit platform enables developers to design, test, deploy, manage and monetize the next generation of software-based telephony services. Developers now have a commercial-grade telephony platform development site where they can develop new applications, move them into production, secure them, and serve them up for billing. Ribbit provides all front-end development tools, the peer community, developer support, as well as the monitoring and management tools you'd expect from Silicon Valley's First Phone Company.

Why would a developer want to add communication features to a website?

Ribbit features make sites, projects and communities more effective communication tools by shortening the distance between companies, customers, and community members. By adding voice and other rich communication features to their web sites, companies will increase sales and increase customer satisfaction by making it easier for site visitors to get information, order a product, make a reservation to a restaurant or hotel, or get expertise and/or customer support.

What does it mean to carriers? What does "Bring Your Own Network" mean?

Programmable telephony is the next generation of communications. Static services and limited telco-defined communication offerings will soon be a thing of the past. Since the core Ribbit infrastructure was built using telco-industry technical and quality standards, carriers around the world can easily "plug" Ribbit into their networks and gain access -- not only to the benefits of a multi-protocol soft-switch, but also to the 20,000+ Ribbit developers and the next-generation applications they are creating. For web developers, Ribbit provides the global network, but for carriers who already have a network, Ribbit provides rich new capabilities as well as new opportunities for revenue.

Ribbit is a part of BT, how does BYON work? A carrier is selling to other carriers?

Ribbit is a stand-alone subsidiary of BT, and is encouraged to make partnerships and relationships with global integrators of all types.

BT is emerging as the first global, programmable phone company, and BYON enables BT to broaden its global footprint and offerings by providing the first platform for the development and delivery of new communications services.

What about Pricing? How much does it cost to use Ribbit?

On the Ribbit Platform, pricing is based on use. You purchase Ribbit services based on your anticipated use of the network, infrastructure and communication features. Accordingly, pricing is variable and will have a different total cost for every deployment.

For the first time ever, a developer can simply go to the Developer Website, estimate their anticipated use, put in a credit card, and "automatically" purchase the communication features they expect to use. Feature use will be different for each integration. While some developers will want to "comms enable" a small business web site, other developers will use Ribbit for large scale deployments. Ribbit customers will pay for the services they end up using.

Ribbit Mobile is currently in beta and is free to use. When we announce the general availability of the product, there will be several plans available based on your usage.

Ribbit CRM pricing begins at $25 a month, per user. Pricing varies by calling, transcription, and feature packages.

Still have questions? Reach out. We are here to help.

Just take a moment to give us a little information about how we can help, and we will have someone get in touch with you lickety split.