Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by wizard_2 on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @11:39PM
(#3214286)
I wanted something like this a few years back for small scale billing. I decided to partner with a local print shop who was able to get me a good pricing on 2 color prints and envelops. I never was able to find a place with a good API that handled low quantity orders with a reasonable price. ($0.45 a bill)
Sendwrite is too expensive (obviously has a different target audience). I had to sign up to get prices.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by JoshTriplett on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:54AM
(#3214582)
They give a quick order of magnitude on their front page without signing up: https://sendwrite.com/ mentions "as low as $1.99 per card in a pack of 20".
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by ericd on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:10AM
(#3214495)
$0.45 per bill? Surely that wasn't the shipped price you were looking for - stamps alone are 0.44 each... On top of that, it's a very labor intensive service.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by JoshTriplett on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:53AM
(#3214578)
Metered mail costs significantly less than stamped mail. A quick check with the USPS suggests a price of $0.237 per piece. That makes $0.45 per piece pretty reasonable for a fully automated service, assuming a human never needs to touch individual pieces of mail.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by ericd on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @06:54AM
(#3215157)
Fair point about metered stuff. I'd assume that it'd be extremely hard to automate this unless it was constrained to one or a couple of types of mail, though.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by dongle on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:19PM
(#3213777)
Neat. Maybe I'll write a script to scrape my Google calendar and automatically send birthday cards. Can see companies using this to send a personal note to their best customers.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by ericd on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:42PM
(#3213857)
I can see a ton of uses for this. Birthday cards, thank you cards for customers, physical appointment reminders for doctors/dentists, having petitions and online organizations that send harder-to-ignore physical mail to your congress people.
With full color printing this becomes even more interesting - direct mailing campaigns become feasible (if expensive) for startups, even with customization.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by stfu on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @10:18PM
(#3214101)
Awesome idea. There can be never enough interesting APIs around.
I once talked to a marketing guy who told me a tale about a campaign he did were he got a bunch of housewives to write handwritten letters to a few hundred core decision makers. Received extremely high response rates through this unusual approach. Just mentioning it as a random idea - would be fun if people could send out actually hand written cards through the service.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by jonpaul on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:45PM
(#3213865)
There was another service that did this and did it well. But apparently it isn't around anymore. It was called Mail Finch. Here is the Mixergy interview, IMHO it's great: http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by dougb on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @09:17PM
(#3213936)
The first I heard of a service like this was
letters.com back in 1994. My friend started it.
He ended up selling the domain for 5 figures
and went on to do the webcounter at digits.com.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by jaylevitt on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @09:35PM
(#3213976)
AOL used TeleMail/SprintMail for this around 1992; Sprint provided an X.400 gateway to both fax and US postal mail, but IIRC the postal mail gateway cost something like $1/page and so nobody ever used it:
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by tonywebster on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:38PM
(#3213841)
I think this is really cool and most definitely needed, but I think it needs to have more than just cards. Certified Mail is a huge requirement for a lot of businesses and right now there's no great solution for automating that -- at least nothing with any friendliness to developers.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by russell_h on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:51PM
(#3213873)
This looks awesome. I have a bunch of thank you cards that I need to send (or rather, I should have sent 3 months ago), so I may give it a shot. My one concern is that you don't seem to get much control over formatting, as far as I can tell the entire message is just a big string.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by colevscode on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @09:05PM
(#3213897)
Hi russell. Right now the formatting is pretty simple. You can use whitespace to break up the message or indent a paragraph. We're currently working on a card designer interface that will allow much more customization. If you have any specific requests please shoot me an email at cole (at) sendwrite.com.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by cdcarter on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:37PM
(#3213839)
With a single card costing just under $3 USD, this isn't an API I think I'll be playing around with until I've got a really good idea, but I can't wait to actually come up with something good.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by askedrelic on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @09:11PM
(#3213913)
My current idea is a bit arty, something like: style for a month.
For 30 days, each day, scrape yesterday's image from http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/ or http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ (or just pick one at random) and use the API to mail it myself. Eventually, I'll be getting a postcard a card of cool style and get a cool physical collection.
I've seen this similarly with Flickr: email me each day with a photo I took 1 year ago (or some random old photo I took), so you always filtering through your old collection. But maybe postcards will feel differently.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by JoshTriplett on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:59AM
(#3214593)
This looks awesome; I've wanted a service for sending mail for a while. Cards seem like a nice place to start; hopefully they'll expand to a few other form factors in the future.
Personally, I'd love to see this for a couple of data-related use cases: mailing either USB disks or CDs based on an uploaded image.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by nitrogen on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @04:32AM
(#3214905)
Back in 2001, a sufficiently large company could upload a .iso to an FTP server, and Cinram (or other disc burning companies) would burn and ship on demand. I'm pretty sure they had a web API that was integrated into the ordering backend of my employer at the time.
Re:SendWrite launches API for physical mail
by jjacobson on Tuesday November 08, 2011 @08:10PM
(#3213751)
An API for creating and sending physical things feels just plain awesome, even though on a fundamental level ecommerce APIs do the same thing. Nice work.
Sendwrite is too expensive (obviously has a different target audience). I had to sign up to get prices.
With full color printing this becomes even more interesting - direct mailing campaigns become feasible (if expensive) for startups, even with customization.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Qa6bcZ0HuVUC&lpg=PA7...
(This looks awesome, by the way.)
For 30 days, each day, scrape yesterday's image from http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/ or http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ (or just pick one at random) and use the API to mail it myself. Eventually, I'll be getting a postcard a card of cool style and get a cool physical collection.
I've seen this similarly with Flickr: email me each day with a photo I took 1 year ago (or some random old photo I took), so you always filtering through your old collection. But maybe postcards will feel differently.
Personally, I'd love to see this for a couple of data-related use cases: mailing either USB disks or CDs based on an uploaded image.
There are others, this is one I found quickly.