Reach Product Overview

Make your website datafree

Reach is a unique product that allows you to make your existing website datafree. Typical modern websites include 3rd party traffic from a variety of domains for the purpose of CDNs, fonts, javascript libraries and other services. No other product in the market can make all traffic, including 3rd party traffic, datafree.

Value Proposition

Datafree Reach allows your audience to browse your website without incurring data charges themselves. With our reverse billing technology, you pay for the aggregate data usage of your website visitors. By removing the data cost barrier, your audience is free to engage with your website which encourages trial and adoption of your services. Reach has all the tools you need to configure your site and provides robust data usage reporting so that you can optimise your site and increase your ROI.

Datafree works for you if:

• You want to reach everyone. Even users without any data balance or airtime on their phones will be able to visit your website.

• You want to maximise engagement. Let users browse your content freely without threatening their access to WhatsApp, Facebook, Music etc.

• You promote via social media. Users who only have ‘Social Packages’ (e.g. data for WhatsApp and Facebook) can’t follow links to your website because it falls outside their plan. When you make your website datafree using our Reach product, you extend the datafree journey beyond social media.

• You want to stand out from the crowd. Mobile users are very 'data aware’. Removing the cost of data will get their attention. Become the website that is always freely available.

• You want to reach your staff. Reverse billing the data is ‘expensing' the data cost, yet is simple to setup and manage.

• You want to provide zero-cost trials. Don’t expect people to pay to trial your product. Give them a way to experience your offer for free – without worrying about the data cost.

How it works

Datafree has reverse billing agreements with all four major South African mobile network operators (Vodacom, Cell C, Telkom and MTN).All mobile traffic passing through our servers is reverse billed to us. A user is charged nothing: they don’t even need credit on their phone!We forward the traffic to your web server where you process every request.We aggregate the cost from the four networks into one bill.You pay for the traffic - the user pays nothing.

Directing the traffic through the Datafree Gateway

This is achieved by simply modifying the domain names used in your URLs:

1. If your website is at https://abc123.co.za/ you start using a new URL such as https://abc123.datafree.co/

2. https://abc123.datafree.co/ talks to our Gateway; we know to forward it on to you at https://abc123.co.za/ so your existing website works normally.

3. Other domains you may use within the site are modified in a similar way.

4. Third party services you use such as Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) are also given special domain names and routed through our Gateway.

5. You market the new datafree URL so that users know to use the new link. You can also redirect from your standard link to the new datafree URL. Ultimately, you want your visitors to go to your new link https://abc123.datafree.co so sessions start by talking to our Gateway.

We provide tools to automate the changes to the domain names making it easy to implement.The solution works invisibly. Your user simply clicks on the new link.

To Get Started

1. If you don't already have an account, request access to the Datafree Portal.

2. Identify your website and register your new datafree domain name.

3. Use our Reach Workbench to automatically change the domain names in your content to send all your traffic through our Datafree Gateway.

4. QA your website with our tools to check everything is working and is being reverse billed.

5. Set up security rules, data limits, etc. to control your spend.

6. Track usage and other metrics through our Datafree Portal.