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Comment by estsauver | Hacker News Reader

Hey HN,

I was moving to Thailand ~6 months ago and I had to cancel my Comcast. Cancelling took way too long and was surprisingly frustrating. From talking with other people it seemed like the cancellation process was really frustrating for other people too, so we made this.

My partner Eli (HN username: EliPollak) and I really want your feedback more than anything. We’re planning to expand into fixing other processes that are really more painful than they need to be. We’re around to answer questions/chat and we’re also available by email at founders@airpaperinc.com.

Thanks!

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Here's a suggestion:

Whenever I go to a new health care provider (or even, often, a health care provider that I have an existing relationship with), I have to fill out those silly medical history forms, and I'm like, "Dude, shouldn't you know all this stuff already?"

It would be nice to be able to say, "Hey, here's the doctor's office where I have an upcoming appointment. Find out what mundane paperwork they expect me to fill out, and fill it out for me." (Many offices now put the forms online so you can download them and fill them out ahead of time.)

Granted, it really only works if I can enter the info once and have you save it and regurgitate it as needed, and then that gets into tricky territory because you're storing sensitive health-related information. But it really would be a valuable service.

How about landlord negotiations? When your landlord tries to raise your rent to above-market rates, it's a pain to look up what the fair rate is and then draft a competent counteroffer letter.

This sounds great. There's probably also a fair amount of forms that have to be filed with Tenant boards in various places.

Thanks!

Do those letters ever work? They are either hoping you will pay, or willing to kick you out for someone that will, no?

If you're a paying (every month, no soliciting, ahead-of-time) tenant and a landlord is raising rent at all: they run the risk of losing a known quantity for a piece of shit tenant.

Unless you're in a usurious, fucked up market (San Francisco), rental owners need to put a dollar amount on losing your tenancy.

If you're paying $2000 a month, raising the rent 5% means that, for an extra $1000 (potentially), you'll spend your time and money showing, placing ads, screening prospective tenants. Time is money. Either you're doing this yourself, as an owner, or paying someone to do it.

The other cost factor at work applies to the tenant: the "cost to move." It's hard to move in-town for less than $500, so this must be weighed.

"it's a pain to look up what the fair rate is and then draft a competent counteroffer letter."

Not that hard these days, viz. https://www.rentometer.com/

Just a heads up: found a typo in your bio on the FAQ page: http://www.airpaperinc.com/faq.html

"penaut" vs "peanut"

Sincerely, Your personal spelling pedant

Just fixed that! Thanks for letting me know

I would suggest using HTTPS on your main domain. While you do include an iframe from a HTTPS source for the form that asks for a credit card, someone could MITM the main domain and replace the iframe source with something else, and the user might never know.

Absolutely. It's fixed now, thank you for the feedback.

I saw that you're collecting credit card numbers on your form... You know that if you are storing them on your servers, you need to follow FDIC regulations, right? Otherwise, you are exposing yourself to a huge liability.

I'd also be worried about whether you are disposing the credit card numbers you collect after they are done in a timely and secure fashion....

Edit: I meant PCI, not FDIC

PCI is the regulating body. FDIC is just concerned with bank deposit insurance. Looks like they're using Stripe, so I'd suppose they're tokenizing those card numbers before dealing with them.

We're using Stripe. We never see the credit card numbers. Cheers!

I don't understand why your front page is so scrolly (Firefox on OSX) but I'm pretty sure it rendered wrong, I can scroll in the x axis past your nice pile of paper on the head of the page and despite my efforts I can't work out what 'Parkin...' you're making easier to get in SF.

Hey! We're working on it, sorry, we should have done cross-browser testing before we posted it here.

Sorry!

~Earl

Best deal for upgrading phone. Companies change from 2 year contract to no contract to whatever. I would like to pay $5 to just break it all down.

This is a great idea! Once you figure out a good model for making processes like this efficient it will probably be easy to apply it to all kinds of problems (as your splash page hints). Good luck with this project.

Thanks! We'd love feedback as to what processes are painful. Keep us in the back of your mind when you're filling out paperwork and send us an email if it feels especially tedious? :)

Have you considered getting into the business of dealing with health insurance companies?

Direct pricing negotiation with hospitals might be easier. From what I understand many hospitals will reduce your bill, or set up a limited- or no-interest payment plan, if you're uninsured or underinsured and can make a coherent case about your inability to pay the full amount.

Interesting, but hard. Due to HIPAA, most hospitals can't/won't speak with anyone but the patient about their bill. I sometimes have a hard time handling negotiations for my own spouse, depending upon how picky they are being.

You know, we have considered it and we want to eventually. The problem is that hospitals typically want to deal with a company that's both more established than we are. They also typically have a much longer sales cycle.

If you have any specific use cases/contacts, please reach out to us though. We might be able to make something work?

I don't, I just happen to know someone who does insurance company negotiations professionally, is pretty successful at it, and is looking to leave their current gig.

This exists, it's called an "advocacy service," and some employers offer access to these services as a benefit to employees. Aon Hewit operates such a service, for example. I recently received a large, surprise medical bill due to an error by the hospital, and the advocacy service did all the legwork/phone calling necessary to get it written off.

I personally do not like having to call every year to re-negotiate my internet service price at a resonable rate for another year. If that service was something you could provide, I would be tempted to use it! Especially if you kept track of when my intro rate would expire etc.

I am getting cloudflare connection timeouts, when I try to open the site. Try setting caching headers on your static content.

Sorry that I don't have more substantial feedback.

Site's down. Did it melt under the weight of making the HN front page?

Error 524 Ray ID: 22f55b2fa1040f2d • 2015-10-03 02:55:01 UTC

I love this idea. I don't need to cancel Comcast yet, but I will definitely use AirPaper when I do.

Thanks! We're glad you like the idea!

Are you in Bangkok? If so, drop me a line...

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