Young Costa Ricans Built a Program to Compete Against Skype

In 2009, while the world was still learning to say “Skype,” a group of young Costa Ricans was quietly helping to build one of its rivals. The story made headlines at home and earned a mention in The New York Times, and it remains one of the most telling early chapters in Costa Rica’s rise as a technology nation.

This is a recount of what happened that year — and, just as importantly, where the project and the technology behind it stand today.

The 2009 headline: “Young Costa Ricans build a program to compete with Skype”

In August 2009, the Costa Rican daily La Nación ran a story in its Aldea Global technology section under a headline that, translated, read “Young Costa Ricans create a program to compete against Skype.” The program was called VoxOx, and according to the paper, a team of young Costa Rican engineers had spent months building it.

What VoxOx did was simple to explain and ambitious in scope. It let users call from one computer to another completely free, and to call from a computer to an ordinary telephone anywhere in the world for a fraction of the usual cost — a rate the article described as roughly ten times lower than what the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) charged at the time. In an era when an international phone call was still a luxury for many families, that was a genuinely disruptive promise.

The detail that made Costa Ricans proud was the size of the local contribution. As one team member, Christopher Jiménez — then a 23-year-old software-engineering student — told La Nación, around 90% of the work to create VoxOx was carried out in Costa Rica. This was not a foreign product with a token local office; it was world-facing software whose engine was built, in large part, by young Ticos.

Why this old technology story is worth preserving

The original news URL has value because it captures a specific moment in Costa Rica’s digital history. Long before “nearshore software development” became a standard business phrase, this story showed Costa Rican engineers contributing to a consumer internet product meant for the global market. It was not tourism, real estate or call-center outsourcing. It was product engineering.

That context matters for readers arriving through old citations. A headline about young Costa Ricans building a program to compete against Skype can sound like a curiosity from another internet era, but it points to a larger pattern: Costa Rica was already producing software talent capable of working on communications infrastructure, user-facing apps and internationally visible platforms. The VoxOx article is therefore both a news archive and a marker in the country’s entrepreneurship timeline.

What VoxOx actually was

VoxOx was more than a calling app. It was an early unified-communications product: a single program that tried to pull a user’s scattered digital life — internet calls, instant messaging across rival networks, SMS, fax, voicemail and more — into one place. At a time when people juggled separate accounts for MSN Messenger, Yahoo, Google Talk and Skype, the idea of one app to tie them together was forward-looking.

The product belonged to Telcentris, a San Diego company founded in 2006 by the Hertz brothers — Bob, Bryan and Kevin — with Bryan Hertz as CEO. Telcentris set out, in its own words, to change the way the world communicates, and VoxOx was its flagship consumer launch. The company supplied the vision and the U.S. base; Costa Rica supplied much of the engineering muscle, a division of labor that would become increasingly common as the country matured into a technology-services destination.

The New York Times connection

The reason this particular story is worth preserving is that it did not stay local. On August 18, 2009, The New York Times ran a “Frugal Traveler” column titled “Calling Home for Even Less,” rounding up the new tools that let travelers phone home without ruining their budgets. VoxOx was among the services it highlighted.

For a small country still building its technology reputation, a mention in the Times was a meaningful stamp of legitimacy — independent, international recognition that software shaped in Costa Rica was competing with the best-known names in internet calling. That link is part of why this chapter deserves a permanent home rather than disappearing into a dead archive.

Where the project is now

More than fifteen years later, the technology behind that 2009 headline is still very much alive. Telcentris eventually rebranded as Voxox, and the company continues to operate from San Diego as a cloud-communications provider. Its focus has shifted from a consumer calling app toward business and developer infrastructure — VoIP and SIP trunking, SMS APIs with short and long codes, hosted PBX and unified communications — and more recently it has positioned itself around an AI-driven voice and messaging automation platform. The company says billions of calls and texts have flowed through its system over the years.

Notably, the Costa Rica connection did not vanish. Voxox has continued to build partnerships in the region, including an integration with RING.CR, a business phone system serving small companies in Costa Rica — a small but fitting echo of where so much of the original engineering came from.

What became of every member of that original young team is harder to trace publicly, and we will not invent a tidy ending. But the throughline is clear: the people and the product at the center of that 2009 story did not flame out. The company endured, evolved with the industry, and kept one foot in Costa Rica.

Why it still matters

It is easy to read this as a single news item from a busy summer in 2009 — the same week, by coincidence, that Oracle opened new offices in Costa Rica. But taken together, those signals marked something larger. They were early evidence that Costa Rica was becoming a place where serious, globally competitive software gets built, not just supported.

In the years since, the country has leaned into that identity: a stable democracy with strong education, a growing pool of bilingual engineers, free-zone incentives and a nearshore time zone that suits North American business. The VoxOx story is a reminder that the foundations of today’s Costa Rican technology and startup scene were already being laid by ambitious young people more than a decade and a half ago.

For travelers and newcomers curious about the country beyond its beaches and volcanoes, it is worth knowing this side of Costa Rica too — the one that quietly helped the world make a cheaper phone call. Learn more about the country’s broader innovation story in our overview of Costa Rican entrepreneurship, its science and technology sector, and why Costa Rica keeps punching above its weight.

Sources: La Nación, “Jóvenes ticos crean programa para competir contra Skype” (Aldea Global, August 2009); The New York Times, “Calling Home for Even Less,” Frugal Traveler (August 18, 2009); and Voxox / Telcentris company materials.