Key takeaways
• Speakk is a South African messenger that runs on reverse–billed mobile data — users send chat and voice without spending a cent of their own data. The Fora Soft team built it from scratch and shipped a stable v1 fast enough to ride a viral growth window.
• The app reached ~100K users in its first month, trended on Google Play, and surpassed millions of messages sent. The same codebase was later forked into an education product when COVID school closures created urgent demand.
• CEO Anthony picked Fora Soft over local SAR and overseas vendors because we were the only team that understood the brief and quoted accurately — technical competence and a portfolio overlapping the messaging space sealed the choice.
• Got a chat, voice, or messenger product that has to work on cheap devices and constrained networks? Book a 30–minute call and we’ll scope it the same way we scoped Speakk.
Anthony — CEO of Speakk — sat down with our team to talk about building a WhatsApp–style chat and voice app for South Africa, the reverse–billing tech that lets users skip data charges, and what it was like to work with Fora Soft from the very first sprint. Below is the conversation in his own words, plus the project context that frames it.
About Speakk — the product Anthony is building
Speakk is a chat and voice messenger built specifically for the South African market. It looks and feels like WhatsApp — sign up, message friends, send voice notes — with one critical difference: users don’t pay for any of the mobile data they consume. Speakk pays the carriers via a reverse–billing arrangement and monetizes through ads served roughly every eight messages. That single design decision unlocks a market of millions of South Africans who own smartphones but can’t afford to use them.
At a glance
Product: Speakk — chat & voice messenger
Market: South Africa — broad smartphone install base, prohibitive data costs
Hook: Reverse–billed data — users pay zero data cost
Monetization: Ad insertion every ~8 messages
Result: ~100K users in month one, millions of messages, trending on Google Play
Engagement: Long–term partnership — multiple products on the same stack
The interview — in Anthony’s own words
What follows is the conversation as it happened. We’ve kept Anthony’s phrasing intact — he speaks for himself.
Prefer the video? Anthony’s full interview is on our YouTube channel.
Tell me about Speakk — what is it?
Speakk is an innovative app in South Africa. People chat and send messages and voicemails there — similar to WhatsApp. However, users don’t pay for any of the mobile data used. Data is very expensive. Millions of South Africans walk around with smartphones but they can’t afford to use them just because of how expensive data is. That’s why we developed Speakk. For them to not pay for data used.
How it works is a simple chat app like WhatsApp. Sign up, send text messages, voice messages. We have ads, so every 8 messages or so you’ll see an ad popping up. So we pay for the data and we make money through advertisements.
How many users?
When we signed up, we got nearly 100K users over a month. Then we had a slight change in business plans. We built another app using that technology. This new app was for the educational market. We had great opportunities with COVID — fortunate negatives, so to speak. There were many public schools in SAR where kids had no opportunity of communicating with teachers in lockdown. So we used our existing technology for that market as well. Fora Soft helped us do that.
Need to ride a growth wave like Speakk did?
Our Agent Engineering pipeline lets us scope, estimate, and ship MVPs ~30–40% faster and cheaper than traditional agencies. Most quotes land within 24 hours.
Was Fora Soft your first choice?
No, it wasn’t. We considered many software development companies, both locally in SAR and overseas. What was very interesting for us — we gave a very simple brief to developers. We wanted to see how they understood the brief and based on that, what technologies they’d recommend and how it would cost.
“Out of all the companies we’ve contacted, Fora was the only company to really grasp the challenge of what we’re doing and give us an accurate quote.”
That’s why you ended up with us, right? — Yeah. Hundred percent. So, it was really because of the technical competence. We landed up being impressed by a number of other aspects working with them, but initially you were much more technically competent than any of the other developers we’d spoken to. We had a look at your portfolio of existing work, which was not only quite wide and quite varied across different industries, but it did overlap somewhat in what we were doing as well. So, you had the experience in the space that we are in as well, which helped.
Your “before” and “after” working with us
We don’t really have a before and after, because we’ve been partnering with Fora Soft from the beginning of this project. So really we worked with Fora Soft for the minimum viable product. We worked with them to create something that would be as light as possible but would still work. And that was the first version of the product that we created with Fora. We then evolved the product and we moved on to new products. The relationship has evolved as the products have evolved, but there wasn’t any “before Fora Soft.” They were really the beginning of the project for us.
Measurable figures — users, messages, downloads
Because our business has changed slightly, it’s difficult to share a lot of that, but we could say that there have been millions of messages sent in our app since we started. We accumulated that really quickly. We were a trending app on Google Play Store for quite a while. We had, at one stage, many thousands of downloads every single day. The app grew very quickly at the beginning.
Why these numbers matter
Reaching 100K users in a month and millions of messages on a niche regional release means two things were working at once: the product–market fit was real (people wanted free messaging) and the backend held up under load. Reverse billing breaks if the message–to–ad pacing or carrier integration falters — and Speakk shipped without that breaking publicly. That’s the engineering story behind the marketing one.
Difficulties while developing the program
Yeah. Like any project, we had a number of difficulties. One of the big challenges we had to overcome was that the app uses this reverse billing technology, which has very, very specific technical requirements. It led to a number of issues at the beginning of the project which were unforeseen on our side and on the Fora Soft side. But it’s something that we did work with Fora Soft over a number of months to get through.
“We ended up with a much more sustainable, robust product at the end that we are quite proud of. That version works better.”
The other issue we had — we did have some issues with Fora Soft in terms of the initial specifications of some new projects that we worked on. There were some of the features that were underspecified that led to us underbudgeting the project. It had a number of ramifications for the business.
Fora Soft was very apologetic about that. They rectified the billing we were on, on some kind of an agreement to help us through some of the budgetary constraints. Then going forward, we didn’t have that problem again. I think you realized where the error came from and you were very careful about that going forward.
What changed after this
The underspecification problem Anthony describes drove a permanent change in how we scope. Today every new engagement runs through a structured discovery sprint — user stories, acceptance criteria, edge–case mapping — before estimates leave our hands. The Agent Engineering toolchain we use accelerates that workflow rather than skipping it.
Communication, professionalism, determination — the rating
Professionalism, determination, and communication are very important when it comes to any IT project. Could you rate us on a scale of 10?
“In terms of professionalism, Fora Soft was very professional throughout.”
We’ve dealt with many different people in the organization and everyone we’ve dealt with has been great, very professional. Obviously, in a long–term working relationship like we’ve had there, there have been one or two issues and those issues had been resolved very, very quickly.
Fora has been incredibly professional in terms of communication as well. We were concerned that our company is based in South Africa — Fora’s team is overseas — and there would be language constraints and time–zone issues in dealing with Fora. This didn’t prove to be a problem at all. We set up a Slack channel to communicate with our project manager when we’re in the middle of the big dev cycles. We were speaking to those project managers throughout the day on a daily basis over Slack.
“The communication was pretty much flawless.”
When we did need to have a face–to–face meeting, we hopped on Skype and we were able to look each other in the eye and to speak a bit more casually. The only communication issues that were introduced every now and again were just due to some of the technical requirements that we had on our side that are very unique to the mobile environment we’re working in. South Africa has a very unique set of mobile users — people walking around with the latest and greatest smartphones, and people walking around with cell phones that are many, many years old. We had to support both.
Would you turn to Fora Soft again? Recommend us?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And we have done other projects with Fora Soft, and we have recommended Fora Soft to others as well. So not only would we do it — we have done it already.
Closing notes from Anthony
On behalf of the whole Fora Soft team, we wish Anthony and Speakk continued success. Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel.
What we actually did for Speakk
Below is the engineering substance behind Anthony’s comments — what shipped, why, and the constraints we worked inside.
| Workstream | What it covered | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| MVP scoping & architecture | Reverse–billed data design, ad cadence, account & messaging primitives, lightweight client footprint | Anthony’s “as light as possible but still works” brief mapped directly to bandwidth and device constraints |
| Native Android client | Chat UI, voice messages, ad insertion every ~8 messages, low–memory footprint for older devices | SAR install base spans flagships and 4–6 year–old phones — both had to work |
| Carrier integration | Reverse–billing technical handshake with the SAR carrier, traffic accounting, edge cases when users roam off the partner network | If billing breaks, users get charged — the entire value prop collapses |
| Ad delivery | Ad pacing logic, network requests counted against zero–rated paths, fallbacks when ad fill is low | Ads pay for the data — pacing has to feel natural to users while keeping unit economics positive |
| Backend & messaging infrastructure | Real–time message delivery, voice note storage and playback, scaling for the viral burst | 100K users in 30 days is a stress test — nothing buckled publicly |
| Education product fork | During COVID, reused the Speakk stack to ship a teacher–student communication app for SAR public schools | A reusable architecture turned a crisis into a second product line |
Other messaging and real–time apps we’ve shipped
Speakk lives in the same neighbourhood as several other Fora Soft projects. If you’re building chat, voice, or video at scale, these are useful comparisons:
Live communication
Live streaming and interactive broadcast platform — chat, reactions, real–time engagement at concert and event scale.
Education + chat
Virtual classroom platform with HD video, whiteboard, and chat — the same kind of stack Speakk’s education fork built on.
Video conferencing
AI–powered sales video platform — SEK 21M funded, real–time meeting capture and analysis.
SaaS booking
Multi–tenant booking platform for fitness studios — real–time scheduling, payments, and notifications.
Why founders like Anthony choose Fora Soft
A few patterns recur across the dozens of testimonials we’ve gathered. Anthony’s checked every box:
1. Accurate scoping on day one
Anthony shopped multiple vendors with the same brief. Only our team understood it well enough to quote accurately — the rest hand–waved.
2. Real domain experience
A portfolio of streaming, messaging, and video projects meant we’d already solved adjacent problems. No learning on the client’s dime.
3. Daily Slack PM cadence
A dedicated PM in your Slack during dev cycles — weekly status, daily check–ins, video when text falls short.
4. Long–term partnership
Anthony came back for a second product on the same stack when COVID created urgent demand. Repeat clients are a quality signal.
5. Owning mistakes
When underspecification hurt Speakk’s budget, we adjusted billing and changed our process. We don’t pretend — we fix.
6. Agent Engineering speed
Today our AI–assisted pipeline ships features ~30–40% faster and cheaper than traditional agencies — without sacrificing scoping rigour.
Related reading and projects
Building a messenger, real–time app, or video platform? These are the resources founders ask us about most often:
Service page
Streaming & real–time software development
How we build chat, voice, video, and live streaming products that scale.
Service page
Native and cross–platform mobile work — from MVPs to multi–million–user apps.
Guide
AI + WebRTC: agents in real–time comms
How AI agents are reshaping voice, video, and chat product design.
Testimonial
Ali from TapeReal — client review
Another founder’s story — building a video social network with Fora Soft.
FAQ for founders considering Fora Soft
How fast can you give us an accurate quote?
Most quotes land within 24 hours of a discovery call. We’ll ask for your brief, walk through user stories with you, and come back with scope, timeline, and price — not a marketing PDF. Anthony’s comparison of vendors maps to what most founders see: many companies will quote anything to win the deal; only a few actually understand the engineering before naming a number.
Can you build for emerging markets with constrained networks?
Yes — Speakk is the proof. We have experience designing for low–bandwidth, high–latency, mixed–device environments where shaving every kilobyte matters. We’ll architect the stack so it works on a six–year–old Android as well as a current flagship.
How do you handle real–time messaging at scale?
Speakk processed millions of messages and surged to ~100K users in month one without public outages. Our team has shipped chat, voice, and video infrastructure for streaming platforms (VOLO.live), video conferencing tools (Meetric), and education platforms (BrainCert) — the patterns transfer.
What does the project management cadence look like?
A dedicated PM joins your Slack during active dev cycles. You get weekly written status, daily check–ins as needed, and video calls when text isn’t enough. Anthony described the result as “pretty much flawless” communication despite being on the opposite side of the planet from our team.
What if requirements change mid–project?
Sprints are planned around clear user stories with acceptance criteria, but the plan flexes when reality demands it. When Speakk needed to fork the codebase into an education product during COVID, we did it on the same stack — not a rewrite. When a budget pressure showed up because of underspecification on our side, we ate the difference and changed our scoping process. We adapt; we own.
Do you work with early–stage startups or only funded ones?
Both. Speakk started as an MVP scoped around the lightest possible client that still worked. We’ll match the rigour and team shape to your stage — you don’t need a Series A to get a serious quote.
Read next
Implementation guide
Android WebRTC screen sharing — the 2026 guide
MediaProjection, foreground services, codec choice — the production playbook.
Tools comparison
AI wireframe tools review — pricing & picks
Visily, UIzard, Relume, v0, Lovable, Bolt — what works for what.
Strategy
Why users abandon apps — and how to retain them
The retention playbook for messaging, social, and consumer apps.
Project
Virtual classroom platform — HD video, whiteboard, chat — running for institutions globally.
Got a project? Let’s scope it the way Anthony scoped Speakk
Free 30–minute scoping call
Bring the brief. We’ll bring the architecture — and a real quote within 24 hours.
Anthony shopped many vendors before picking us. The deciding factor was that we were the only team that understood the brief well enough to quote accurately. We still scope that way — faster now, thanks to our Agent Engineering pipeline (~30–40% quicker and cheaper than traditional shops). If you’ve got a chat, voice, video, or messenger product on your roadmap, this is the cheapest way to find out what it really takes to build.
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