Wow, $1 for 100 emails is very very very very expensive. So expensive that I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money.
It's a pretty solid idea otherwise.
It's a pretty solid idea otherwise.
This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations.
I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a million emails to break even. How many of this kind of transactional email do you send per year?
That's $2 per month of cost.
A developer costs $150k a year, and if it takes a month to develop, you could have the service for some 5000 months.
In-house developers should focus on the business domain, not on custom building business processes.
Legal needs to review because it is sending employee PII (emails, phone numbers, etc) to a third party, who now knows the individuals in critical "approval roles".
Next hit up security and have them do an audit since this is going to be part of a security control. For bonus points, the internal pentest team finds a bypass that ApproveAPI needs to fix.
Your $150k a year developer is now spending 3-5 hours a week for 3 weeks shepherding a vendor onboarding for something they could have built and tested in a few hours.
And in most cases, vendor management isn't going to get involved for something that will be expensed on a credit card for $2/mo
Once had an internal infrastructure team estimate £70K for the infrastructure to host a single static HTML page.... :-)
But it is part of a business critical flow, and therefore handing it over to a third party is absolutely unthinkable.
I constantly see people not even considering what it means to be giving (potentially critical) business processes away to another company, not having any real knowledge in house, and not realizing that sometimes partners suck and won't help you fix problems in their software.
Neither is a sure bet all of the time, but just dismissing pulling things in house neglects a lot of other downsides to outsourcing.
Approvals here cost ~1¢. Picking a figure of $100k as a developer salary (as it was the first result in a quick search) that puts a lowish bound as about $400/day. So you could take your estimate of build & maintenance times per year, multiply by about 40-50,000 and that's how many approvals you're looking at.
So if you're google doing this every login, sure, that would be prohibitively expensive. If it's my accountants site doing it before they charge me a different amount for filing (there's one of these every year) or being the approve/reject part of an HR holiday system, or anything less common you'd have to be pretty big before it'd be worth spending a day or so building it yourself.
Personally I could see myself using it in some automated workflows I'm building now. Script runs, but before it does something irreversible (e.g. ordering an item) it checks with me that things look OK. It'll cost me a tiny fraction of the total spending, and it's ready right now (and works!).
I also want to mention that we do support volume pricing, so if you want to send lots of approvals per month we can work together on a price that makes sense for your use case -- just reach out to us at support@approveapi.com.
At $100 per hour for a professional, you could save around $159 by using this service.
Seems like the pricing works out to me. You just have to figure out how much time is wasted in traditional approval and how much time this approval method saves the customers.