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CloudSponge Reviews & Product Details

CloudSponge Overview

What is CloudSponge?

The CloudSponge Contact Picker improves your word-of-mouth sharing feature by making it easy for your users to share their contacts. We include all the major address books for your users to choose from. Most customers use CloudSponge to allow their users to share their contacts without having to leave their websites. We’ve come a long way from the copy and paste game. We know that once a customer has to leave a site to gather that information, they could leave forever. With the Contact Picker, users have straight access to their entire address books. Sharing contacts becomes a simple click. With straight access to their address books, users are going to share more. That means more site visitors, more referrals, more sales, better open rates, and lower customer acquisition costs.

CloudSponge Details
Languages Supported
Bulgarian, German, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese (Traditional)
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Product Description

CloudSponge is a software-as-a-service tool for importing contacts from address book providers like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, iCloud and AOL.

How do you position yourself against your competitors?

CloudSponge has a team dedicated to keeping our 50+ contact importers functioning 24/7/365. When address book providers change, our automated status testing service detects it within 5 minutes and notifies our team immediately.

Since our solution is hosted by us, we handle all of the sensitive data so that our clients don't have to worry about taking possession of their users' usernames and passwords. Our infrastructure, policies and procedures are routinely audited and held to the highest standard.

Companies that don't want to be distracted by the tedious process of integrating with several address book providers but still want a very high quality integration with uptime monitoring choose CloudSponge instead of building their own integrations.


Seller Details
Year Founded
2009
HQ Location
San Francisco
Twitter
@CloudSponge
5,103 Twitter followers
LinkedIn® Page
www.linkedin.com
4 employees on LinkedIn®

Jay G.
JG
Overview Provided by:
Founder of CloudSponge, Partner at Arizona Bay

Recent CloudSponge Reviews

Verified User
U
Verified UserMid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Works great"
Seamlessly integrates, works well, great for lead gen and address books.
SR
Sean R.Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Great software for adding that viral component to build your user base!"
Cloudsponge is really a breeze to integrate and get up and running within a very short period of time. Testing was easy and took less than an hour ...
SJ
Sujay J.Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"CloudSponge Email Address Book Integration"
CloudSponge provide an excellent address book tool/widget that can be used to extract contacts from people using your website. 10 years ago, when I...
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CloudSponge Media

CloudSponge Demo - CloudSponge Address Book Contact Picker Menu
Your users see a list of as many as 50 address book providers so they can choose the one that works for them.
CloudSponge Demo - CloudSponge Skinnable Contact Picker
You can override CloudSponge's default style with your own fonts and colors to make the Contact Picker match your site perfectly.
CloudSponge Demo - CloudSponge Responsive Address Book Widget
The address book widget renders itself beautifully on all devices to make sure your users have the best experience possible regardless of their screen size.
CloudSponge Demo - CloudSponge Address Book Advanced Search
The Contact Picker includes fast, local searching and a tappable alphabet in the right margin to make sure your users can find their contacts quickly.
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Video Reviews

18 CloudSponge Reviews

4.8 out of 5
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18 CloudSponge Reviews
4.8 out of 5
18 CloudSponge Reviews
4.8 out of 5

Overall Review Sentiment for CloudSpongeQuestion

Time to Implement
<1 day
>12 months
Return on Investment
<6 months
48+ months
Ease of Setup
0 (Difficult)
10 (Easy)
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G2 reviews are authentic and verified.
Sachin U.
SU
Chief Marketing Officer
Computer Games
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
Verified User in Information Technology and Services
UI
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Review source: G2 invite
Incentivized Review
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

Seamlessly integrates, works well, great for lead gen and address books. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

haven't used it too much yet to find a dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

Dev time for lead gen, this is an easy capture & easy way to access lots of data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SR
CEO and Founder
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
More Options
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

Cloudsponge is really a breeze to integrate and get up and running within a very short period of time. Testing was easy and took less than an hour and so was moving to production. Everything worked right out of the box with no hiccups. It looks very slick and is also responsive just like it says. It was also very easy to customize and work in different ways. For example you can give direct buttons for different mailboxes like yahoo, msn etc, versus giving a single button by which a user can choose from a whole bunch of mailboxes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

Having to pay for this since we are are so spoilt with free software.. However, the CEO of Cloudsponge is very considerate with young startups which is a great thing. Nothing to really to dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CloudSponge:

Check out this product. You can integrate it without making much changes to your code at all so you should be able to give it a good run before making any big decisions about how long you want to use it and and how much you may want to spend on it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

Adding a viral component to build your user base. Users are lazy enough and to enter a list of their friends' emails is too much to ask from them. Software that imports your address book from different mail box providers like yahoo is known to greatly enhance your conversion rate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SJ
Founder
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
More Options
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

CloudSponge provide an excellent address book tool/widget that can be used to extract contacts from people using your website. 10 years ago, when I had the same problem, my company had to write adapters for each email provider and it was not the core problem that we were solving. Today, there is this great service (backed by an equally great group of human beings) and this means we can focus more directly on the problem at hand. There have been a couple of hurdles when looking to obtain permissions from email providers like Outlook and GMail but luckily the guys at CloudSponge have seen this all before and were responsive to our requests for guidance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

Nothing. There were no points in our journey where we hit anything to dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CloudSponge:

Solved and business problem and is backed by a group of people who really care about your success using their product. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our business, LeavingCard.com, allows the site visitor to create collaborative eCards. The user needs access to their contacts in order to loop in both the people collaborating on the card, and also the end recipient. CloudSponge's tool set helps us here. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

JU
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
More Options
Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

Provides data in a consistent JSON format regardless of the originating data source. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

Not much to dislike. Its about as easy as it gets when connecting to multiple address book providers such as GMail, Officer 365 etc.... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering CloudSponge:

If you know what a Google API key is then you have all the skills you need to easily allow your users to share contact information from their services such as GMail, Office 365 etc... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

CloudSponge makes it very straightforward to allow my users to connect to their own personal address books and then have that data passed along to my server in an easy to read JSON format. It would take me forever to try and code the UI and integrations with all of these other systems which I can do in under an hour with CloudSponge. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brian M.
BM
Founder/CEO: MineLife.org
Mining & Metals
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

Jay and Graeme are fantastic guys to work with. They helped us quickly integrate CloudSponge into our project and their website provides developers with clear-cut guidance on how to build a world-class referral marketing program:

https://www.cloudsponge.com/solutions/referral-programs/

Looking forward to CloudSponge helping us exponentially grow our user base. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

The Con is related to Google's Gmail validation requirements and this is where Jay & Graeme exceeded our expectations - supporting us along the way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

Helping our customers more easily access emails from their address books. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Jacob M.
JM
Lead Software Developer
Computer Software
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
(Original )Information
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

The integration was simple, the support is extraordinary, and our time to market was a small fraction of what it would have been were we successful building a similar tool ourselves.

CloudSponge even modified their product to support a unique requirement we had, so we didn’t have to make the customization ourselves. We were certainly impressed with that level of support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

No complaints, the tool did exactly what we wanted. It even gave us more options than we knew what to do with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

PledgeStar wanted to make it easier for its users to send pledge requests by selecting family and friends from their online address books instead of entering them manually.

We initially started to code it ourselves, but then discovered CloudSponge and immediately realized we’d be fools to create what they had already perfected. Developing, testing and maintaining that code would surely increase our time to market and introduce unnecessary risk.

Our initial goal was to make it easier for our users to send pledge requests to their family and friends. What we didn’t anticipate was that users who used our online address book feature received 25% more donations than those who didn’t. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DM
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
More Options
Validated Reviewer
Review source: Seller invite
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

I really enjoyed working with Jay and his team. They were super responsive when we had questions or needed some additional functionality. They deployed so we could. :) We needed to be able to have an easier way for people to invite others to our system since we are a closed invitation only platform and Cloudsponge did the trick. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

We ended up rolling a lot of our own UI and interactions because what we needed didn't fit into the normal use cases. However, the team was very responsive and helpful in helping us achieve our goals. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our business is an invitation only system and therefore it is pretty important that people can easily invite others. Cloudsponge is helping us help our users do just that. We have only just recently released the functionality but we are already seeing an increase in invitations sent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Wesley H.
WH
Technical Research Assistant II
Defense & Space
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

My research on how to import email addresses from users' contacts lists and quickly became a search for the best 3rd party solution for it. It would be ridiculous to implement oauth for a couple dozen email providers so you can hook into your user's contact lists. So after an afternoon of research and tinkering around I decided on and set up CloudSponge. Their setup docs are pretty straight forward so it was easy to get working in my Rails/React app. Using the finished product after an afternoon of researching/tinkering was definitely the best part. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

The pricing is a little steep. It's high enough where I considered implementing my own solution just for Gmail. However it is nice to know that many many email clients are represented so I haven't bothered. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

The Hustle has a page where subscribers can invite their friends to subscribe, and they get referral credit. The CloudSponge plugin allows users to select emails from their email client's contact list so they don't have to type them in. We're emailing approximately 200 invites a day and about 6 people use the CloudSponge plugin. But when they do use the plugin they tend to email more people. One person invited over 6000 people from his contacts. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Internet
UI
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Seller invite
What do you like best about CloudSponge?

Customizable with fast import, an easy integration. Save us huge amount of development time and headaches. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about CloudSponge?

From my experience nothing I can point to Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is CloudSponge solving and how is that benefiting you?

Allow our users to imports their contact list and spread the word about our causes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.