sirchimp

VeriClock | Vancouver/Canada | Remote | Multiple Roles | Full Time

We build employee scheduling and time tracking software, primarly for a mobile workforce, that is slowly morphing into a general purpose HRM solution, integrating with accounting and payroll software.

We are hiring for multiple roles across biz dev, sales and engineering. Our primary tech stack is typescript on node w/ mysql on the backend, and typescript react/react-native on the front end.

https://www.vericlock.com/careers/

My business partner was in the construction industry, and had a direct need for the product at the time. My family is also in the construction industry and when I consulted with them on how their employee time tracking was actually done (paper time sheets filled out bi-weekly) I was somewhat shocked. The toughest part is actually convincing some people that there is a better way and that they will save boatloads of time and money by using us.

We based our pricing in part on the cost associated with average usage. Some additional features are billed on a per use basis since the standard deviation from average use for those features is so high.

We at VeriClock are using Twilio for our product (employee time tracking - the punch in/out by phone call/SMS component is where Twilio comes in).

As far as demand goes, we're seeing very positive uptake of the service. Pretty much everyone has a cell phone these days, so the value proposition to our customer (amongst others) is that there is no need to buy custom time keeping hardware.

When we were initially building this out, we evaluated Voxeo, Plum Voice, Twilio, as well as doing it ourselves with Asterisk.

Voxeo and Plum Voice both seemed solid, but looked to be targeting a different customer than a startup. Pricing doesn't start becoming reasonable until very high volumes can be committed to. Voxeo had a self hosted version of their product that was quite interesting, requiring a one time upfront cost and then you simply hookup your own VOIP connection. The cost was still going to be prohibitive in our case since we needed a large amount of concurrent capacity to handle a few hours of peak usage during the day.

Twilio was very easy to use, and the price was almost on par with the big guy's high volume prices, but without the need to commit to $50k/mo in spending. Those two things combined really made the decision. We were a little worried about the up-time, as the sales effort from the big guys tried to scare us away from Twilio. In the end uptime has been quite good, with only a few minor glitches here and there, usually localized to a specific carrier in a specific region.

Plivo was not around at the time. It looks fairly similar to Twilio, but I have not fully evaluated it.

Another service that looks promising is Tropo (owned by Voxeo if I'm not mistaken, and running on their platform). Its much closer to Twilio in pricing, and had a pretty nice API as I recall.

I would recommend one of those three for a startup - Twilio, Plivo, or Tropo. The price point makes it worth while. If you get traction and have a viable business model, and feel the reliability isn't quite there, you can try another service. But you risk very little money upfront.

I would love to hear other opinions on Plivo, Tropo, or other competitors out there.