How Chatra reduced time to market by 2 months and saved $10K

Chatra is a cloud-based live chat platform that helps companies communicate with customers online. It allows users to answer website visitors’ questions or contact them proactively through targeted auto-messages. Personal communication with potential clients allows businesses to collect feedback, capture leads, and eventually boost sales.

Initially built as live chat software for websites, Chatra has become more than that. Today, users can answer emails and Facebook messages directly from the app, and more features are on the way. The team aims to continue adding functionality to enter the helpdesk services market.

Since its foundation, the number of Chatra users has been increasing by 35% per year on average. Contrary to expectations, the team itself hasn’t grown. Behind the scenes, there have always been nine full-time employees strongly focused on the application’s development.

Chatra manages to keep a small team by outsourcing as many tasks as possible. Among other things, that includes building and maintaining file management. The application enables user-uploaded avatars and file transfers between users and their websites’ visitors.

When the functionality originally needed to be developed, the founders of Chatra were faced with a common choice: create the infrastructure themselves or implement a third-party service. Having built their own file-handling systems before on previous projects, the Chatra team intimately understood the drawbacks. The initial development would have required about two months and about $10K of investments.

Plus, the service would have to be constantly maintained. Any file-handling infrastructure must stay compatible with the ever-changing browser ecosystem. With an in-house system, Chatra would need to periodically track browser updates and ensure compatibility themselves.

Having already built a similar system on previous projects, Chatra decided to find a reliable partner right away this time. Integrating a ready-made solution would allow the team to launch the product faster, while saving on initial investments and precious developer time.

The Chatra team was expecting their go-to solution to ensure these three elements:

Issues with file transfers could prevent operators from helping real-time visitors place an order. To avoid that, Chatra was looking for a fail-safe infrastructure with guaranteed uptime.

The intuitive interface on both users’ and their customers’ end significantly reduces customer churn and support burden. The team required a user-friendly solution that would look native.

Chatra was looking for a self-scaled infrastructure backed with an enterprise-grade SLA that would run smoothly with an ever-growing user base and bandwidth.

Chatra has been relying on Uploadcare from the outset. At the time they had very limited resources, which made additional development physically impossible.

It started with a simple feature: user-uploaded avatars. Chatra implemented it with Uploadcare in just over a day, including testing time. The operators were now able to welcome potential buyers with the faces of the team, making communication more personal.

Uploadcare allows Chatra’s users to upload their profile photo from a number of sources or simply take it with a webcam. The uploaded image can be further resized in the browser. This additional functionality isn’t something Chatra would have developed if they had chosen to take on file handling.

A year later, Chatra decided to add file transfers to their chat widget so website visitors and operators could exchange media, such as screenshots of webpages. This is especially useful when solving customers’ issues. Once again, the quick and straightforward integration helped save developer time, which is like gold dust to the company.

By relying on Uploadcare from the very beginning, Chatra saved developer time. Rather than building custom file-handling functionality from scratch, the team focused on the core application instead. As a result, Chatra was able to fill the market niche by releasing quality software just in time.

Back in 2015, Chatra was a young software startup company with limited financial and development resources. They were eager to appear on the market as quickly as possible, yet without sacrificing the quality of the product. To do that, the team decided to focus all its efforts on the application and find a reliable partner for file management.

Integrating Uploadcare allowed Chatra to save about $10K of initial investments. Plus, the developers gained two months that they would have spent on building a similar solution otherwise. The company was able to reduce time to market and seize the right moment to launch.

With Uploadcare, Chatra saves on indirect costs. The “set-and-forget” infrastructure doesn’t require any maintenance burden. The team doesn’t have to worry about implementing additional functionality as needed and staying compatible with a constantly shifting browser ecosystem.

Chatra can use the time saved on developing new features and maintaining the core functionality. Promptly updating the product helps the company avoid lost profits.

Uploadcare’s infrastructure was first battle-tested years before Chatra was created. It’s backed up by a reliable file hosting and content delivery network. The 99.9% uptime saves users trouble and reduces the pressure on Chatra’s support team, which has only three specialists for 40,000 active users.

Uploadcare is an end-to-end cloud platform that provides a next-gen infrastructure for file handling. It can cover any part of the media pipeline or all of them at once: