A letter to Layer’s customers

We at Sendbird understand how hard development teams work to create great user experiences for their customers. It is often delicate for development teams to make decisions to abstract entire parts of their technology with third-party services – whether for important product functionalities or the complete underlying infrastructure. Yet, development teams place their trust in third-party services like an extension of their team. It’s a brave decision to place trust in an API service, but it’s frustrating when that promise is broken and the service goes down.

Our heart goes out to Layer’s customers and their development teams who have just heard that the Layer chat platform will shut down after October 30th. Chat is an an integral part of a users experiences for many businesses and their applications, and it’s difficult to absorb any disruption or service down time. We can imagine product and development teams huddling in war rooms worldwide to ensure next steps on how to keep this core user experience alive. We empathize with the frustration and want to let you know that we are here for you, for the long term.

After hearing about similar stories about a lack of reliability and stability regarding Layer’s chat API, our development team sprung into action and developed a Sync Server and migration plan to help customers migrate from Layer to Sendbird, and avoid any disruption to their service or chat data loss. We’re happy to say that not only did we help several Layer customers move to a more stable and reliable service, but we also helped our customers witness improvement in their chat engagement and adoption from better user experiences.

Customers that have placed their trust in us and migrated over to Sendbird are emerging local and global disruptors including Hinge, Accolade, Paytm, KeepTruckin, RallyHealth, CommonStock, Branch Messenger, and Dubizzle, just to name a few. Many of them are the No. 1 players in their respective markets, and we’re here to help them to continue their journey toward even greater success.

One of the first Layer customers to make the switch over to Sendbird was Hinge.

Hinge has an active user base and could not update their apps instantly given their scale. To ensure a seamless migration we applied a two-prong approach:

1. Batch migration of all past data,

2. Sync server to carry out data updates in real-time.

As a result, Hinge’s message data was transferred with zero disruption to its service or user experience. They were able to go to market with Sendbird in days, and saved significant engineering resources spent on migrating and developing on Sendbird. Hinge CTO Ben Celebicic, says,

“We decided on Sendbird primarily for two reasons: their product seemed very much in line with our needs (i.e., richly-featured chat service), and their client base gave us confidence that they would be able to handle our traffic and projected growth.”

We’re humbled by the trust that our customers place in us, and continue to work harder every day to build a more stable and reliable chat service and infrastructure. As the No.1 chat API in the world, in our view, the journey has just begun, and we’re building our product to last a lifetime. We’re in this for the long run and our long-term investors have continued to put more faith in our company and mission. We believe the only way to sustain is to have an endless tenacity for customers – for us, that means not just being hyper focused on building the best service for our customers’ needs, but really being there for them when it matters the most.

The team at Sendbird stands with you and we are here to serve.

Best regards,

John, CEO of Sendbird