Ask HN: Internet-scale fax service w/ API? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Internet-scale fax service w/ API?

2 pointsghurlman8 comments

My business partner & I are building a web application to drag the construction industry into the 21st century. They'll come, kicking and screaming, but not without their fax machine. I've found a couple fax services that provide an API, but they all seem to aim their pricing model towards companies building an internal app that will send fax pages on the order of 100s, not 1000s a month.

Are there any service providers out there that get it, or is this something we'll have to build for ourselves?

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> "a web application to drag the construction industry into the 21st century"

Given the effects of the current economic cycle on construction, I'm somewhat dubious regarding the marketability of SaaS because it is a recurring overhead expense...and minimizing overhead is one reason faxes are so popular (the others are traditions of craft, computerphobia, and the ability of office staff to triage faxes more easily than emails).

In my experience in the US, businesses in the construction industry are as invested in technology as other companies of comparable size in other industries (IT excluded). Those firms with high volumes of faxes often have hardware capable of document management and many firms utilize it.

I'm not sure that I see a clear market segment for a web app because tech savvy contractors already have tools and methods, and the others aren't because they can't or won't spend time and money to obtain digital tools and learn them.

For construction companies, the key issues are book keeping and scheduling. In my opinion, faxing is not a 1.0 requirement.

Good Luck.

Construction in the commercial space has picked back up - not as much new structures as improvements on existing properties. Residential is still at a standstill.

Our target user isn't the company owner, it's the GC Project Manager working at a small-midsize GC company. My cofounder has been doing this work for years, developed a v0.1 himself, and asked me to see if I could bring it large.

We'll see! Thanks for the input.

As GC's get larger, they tend to have the leverage to require their subs to use email...when they get really large, they often have the leverage to require the use products like Buzzsaw.

A while back there was a startup with this exact idea from the HN community. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294079) I love the idea, and said so then.

I talked with the developers a few times and learned recently that they had shelved the product. There are some existing enterprise solutions for electronic faxing. While building a service for smaller companies (and individuals that have the need to fax now and then) seemed to be a very difficult market to penetrate.

I'm not suggesting that their decision to shelve the product indicates it's not possible for you to succeed, but I do know they gave it a good shot and couldn't make money at it.

Perhaps going after a single industry, as you're suggesting, and vetting the idea (and price point) with them ahead of time, could get you closer to understanding if this is sustainable or not.

You could integrate the Internet fax service into your web interface and manage it as you like. There are no sending limits, more information is available on: http://www.popfax.com/index.php?action=partners_new

Not familiar with it, but I believe drop.io offers some form of fax ability.

EDIT: Guess that won't do much good as I just read that drop.io was acquired by Facebook and they are discontinuing the service. Oh well.

This should work: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/ringcentral-fax

I recently read about one(Chandigarh, India) about one which lets you send a fax through an email, but I am not sure if it provides an API or not.

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