RingBranch Will Attempt to Remain Free!

Over the past few months, we have polled our present user community and overwhelmingly heard from you that you would like RingBranch to remain a free service.   Well, we have taken that advice to heart and are now trying a new business model that we hope will enable us to keep RingBranch free indefinitely.

Starting today, we are now inserting audio advertisements from various advertisers into the calls. If you are a RingBranch user, you will hear a short ad right when you call in and a second ad right before your call is connected. Additionally, if someone calls you on your RingBranch number, the caller will hear a short ad before the call is connected to you.

We are hoping that we can make enough money from the advertising to cover our expenses, which are not minimal. We will see--this is an entirely new business model that has been discussed but not really pursued, at least not yet.

Obviously, we are trying this model so that you can use our service for free. Our goal is to expand and offer international calling for free in this ad supported manner as well.  We know and understand that not everyone likes advertising. So, in the near future, we will roll out an ad-free option that will enable you to pay a small monthly fee to use RingBranch without advertising.

Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions.

The RingBranch Team

Comments

[spg]

i think there are lots of other people like myself who are very happy to listen to ads them self in exchange for free phone calls; however are not willing to subject any other persons to those ads(at least not without there advance knowledge). this brings the following idea:

this is a whole new concept separate from the current service. there are quite a lot people in the usa who would like a free SIP service for outbound calls that includes an inbound number in there own area code. would you consider starting a service that has ad free inbound calling(with choice of area code) but ads on all outbound calls. while this would not make sense for you with the current PSTN service with a SIP service you would not have the PSTN charges(only the data charges) on inbound calls only on outbound. in order to make sure that the basic expense of keeping an account active is met every month you could have a minimum amount of outbound calls(and therefore ad presentations) per month in order not to have the account canceled. this would also ensure that users are not just getting a free local inbound DID without using the rest of the service. i believe such a service would be a huge hit particularly with the VOIP enthusiast/hobbyist community.

[RingBranch]

Hi SatPhoneGuy:

As always, we appreciate your candid and thoughtful feedback and we're going to take it into consideration. Right now, we're just trying to figure out our business model, and where/when to place the ads, as we're continually tweaking the service. This is not the final version, so look for some changes in the next few days.

Also, we've got some new features coming out soon as well, so keep in touch.

Many thanks for being one of our users!

Btw, we like the product suggestion you mentioned, and we're going to stew on it to see if we can incorporate it into our offering.