SendWrite launches API for physical mail | Hacker News Reader

SendWrite launches API for physical mail

sendwrite.com

69 pointscolevscode35 comments

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.

  1 Card - $2.99
  3 Cards - $7.99
  10 Cards - $24.99
  20 Cards - $39.80

$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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but that's a great idea.

I am building this right now actually ;).

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.

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.

PostalMethods has been doing this for years. http://www.postalmethods.com/

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/

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.

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:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Qa6bcZ0HuVUC&lpg=PA7...

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.

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.

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.

Personally, I'd like to just upload a PDF of the appropriate size for your card stock, and use my own formatting tools to produce that PDF.

(This looks awesome, by the way.)

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.

Shoot me an email at cole (at) sendwrite.com and I'll send you a few free cards to play with.

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.

What I need is an api to tell me when there's mail in my PO box.

Earth Class Mail? I don't know if they have an API - they do have web access and web-based mail reading, though.

No API yet, but they do send you an email notification.

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.

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.

http://www.cd-fulfillment.com/self-publish-cd-dvd.asp

There are others, this is one I found quickly.

Love the idea. Wish there were more specs on the physical product. Sample shots, for example.

Check this older thread out, along with comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300711 -- maybe some synergy?

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.

Just US? I don't see any info on international mail.

The UK has several companies doing this. For example, http://www.cfhdocmail.com/

I know you have a image preview on the site. Returning that through the API would be cool too.

A "Hello World" example might take a while to pan out.

love it. keep up the great work, cole. let me know when it can automatically prompt me to mail for my friend/family's birthdays.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com