OnSIP Intros Freemium UCaaS Offering

PRESS RELEASE — Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) provider OnSIP announced today the launch of a free plan, empowering organizations to voice call, video chat, message, extension dial, view presence, and share web call links with external parties for free. While there are many free collaboration apps on the web, OnSIP is a pioneer in connecting organizations with their clients, customers, and other stakeholders at no charge— traditionally a phone system function.

“This is a big stepping stone for OnSIP and our industry,” said Mike Oeth, CEO and Cofounder of OnSIP. “Unified Communications has been lagging behind other SaaS verticals on the freemium model because UCaaS providers need to recover PSTN and software licensing costs of service. We are able to break this paradigm because we built a web-based real-time communications platform with no underlying software licensing and exceptional scalability. With OnSIP’s Free Plan, we hope to show organizations that they can seamlessly move their calling to the web and gain better data and user experiences.”

Businesses on OnSIP’s Free Plan can skip the traditional phone system by giving their teams the OnSIP app to make and answer calls, adding call links to their email signatures, as well as placing web call buttons throughout their website and apps. (OnSIP has demonstrated adding a call button to a Facebook page tab.) The OnSIP app is a business-grade browser phone with added capabilities such as: drag-and-drop transfer, video chat, presence, call queue monitoring, voicemail management, and a Slack integration.

Specifically, the OnSIP Free Plan comes with the following features:

(more features on next page)

{vpipagebreak}

“Through our freemium offering, we highlight the possibilities that emerge when the web meets business communications,” added Nicole Hayward, OnSIP CMO. “For example, customers using our free web call buttons can upgrade to Video on Hold, a feature that enables marketing teams to stream engaging videos while their callers wait in a queue.”

OnSIP is also releasing a free plan for developers. Starting today, developers can create a free developer account and take advantage of the OnSIP Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) for up to 100 simultaneously registered users. This allows CPaaS developers to build applications in “sandbox” mode for as long as they need.

As Oeth explained and has been previously covered by NetworkWorld, OnSIP is able to deliver free service due to their platform architecture. Because the OnSIP platform was built using open source technologies, the company does not have software licensing fees and can pass these savings onto customers. In addition, the company holds a patent “System and Method for Geographic SIP Scaling,” U.S. Patent Number 8,650,243, that outlines their ability to continuously scale the platform and provide multimedia communications service between endpoints on the internet.

The ability to deliver pure web-based calling to customers is also thanks to an open source project called WebRTC, which enables real-time voice, video, messaging, and data in the browser without plugins or add-ons. This announcement comes on the heels of two developer conferences OnSIP attended in support of WebRTC: ClueCon and Real-Time Web Solutions. OnSIP has been named a WebRTC Pioneer by TMC and continues to further this technology with their open source library for JavaScript developers, SIP.js. For more information about OnSIP, visit http://www.onsip.com.

About OnSIP
Founded in 2004, OnSIP is a leading provider of real-time communications (RTC) services to over 45,000 businesses. OnSIP® Hosted VoIP customers enjoy the benefits of an on-demand phone system without the traditional high cost, burden, and inflexibility. The company also offers a cloud platform and simple APIs for developers to rapidly and affordably build RTC applications of their own. For more information, visit http://www.onsip.com.