PepperTalk gives your app chat features without needing to code from scratch

Calling is on its way to becoming the most useless feature in the smartphone.

A viral screenshot of a 13-year-old girl’s iPhone home screen had everything but the phone. Instead, Instagram and Messages are displayed prominently, with FaceTime and Snapchat tucked away in folders. It’s a sign that we’re growing accustomed to texting instead of talking.

This trend, along with a “decisive shift to mobile and apps” as a means for businesses to reach customers, is what convinced Karthik Kumaraswamy and team to start PepperTalk, a service for developers to quickly add chat features into their apps without re-inventing the wheel.

The SDK supports iOS, Android, and the web, and can be integrated in as little as an hour with 12 lines of code. It enables one-to-one and group chat, broadcast messaging, photo and location sharing, chat notifications and message receipts, analytics, and more.

Beyond increasing deployment speed, the Bangalore-based startup can help programmers prevent some maintenance and infrastructure cost headaches. That’s because the entire chat backend is managed by PepperTalk, which allows its developers to focus on their core competencies. Integrating chat could also boost an app’s user engagement and not lose them to Whatsapp and other communication tools.

PepperTalk isn’t the first of its kind. San Francisco-based startup Layer has raised a US$14.5 million series A round to become a “full-stack building block for communications.” Appspand is the Korean equivalent which has extra features like chat history search and device-to-device communications.

Kumaraswamy tells Tech in Asia that PepperTalk is most similar to Layer, although he’s been told by users that his solution is “far easier to integrate and much better priced.” PepperTalk has a free tier for the chat feature’s first 1,000 monthly active users, while Layer is completely pay-to-play (its pricing tiers are far more comprehensible though).

PepperTalk’s pricing:

Layer’s pricing: