Wonder

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Research Outline

Prepared for Cherry P. | Delivered March 27, 2020

Premium Communication Features

Goals

To understand what features of communication apps/services are considered "premium" and what are people paying for.

Early Findings

  • On Slack, paid extras include accessing the entire message history, unlimited integrations, group calls and more storage. This is mostly targeted to businesses.
  •  WhatsApp offers all of its features for free. These include messaging, group messaging, voice calls, video calls, document sharing and more. There is no paid/premium model.
  •  Signal and Telegram are also completely free with no paid features.
  • Discord, targeted towards gamers, is also mostly free. Paid members gain a custom tag, animated GIFs, high-quality live streams and video, custom emojis and larger upload limits.
  • Snapchat is also completely free.
  • Google Voice is mostly free to the general public, but its services are also available for businesses to add onto G-Suite as it allows multiple users (rather than just one). Subscribers also gain access to more features like more locations, voicemail transcripts, integration with Hangouts and more.
  •  Skype offers some features for free, such as Skype-to-Skype calling and messaging. People wanting additional features, mostly to reach users not on Skype (direct-to-phone calling and messaging), need to subscribe or purchase credit.
  •  Tom's Guide has a list of the top 25 messaging/communication apps in 2020.