Show HN: I made a tool to send a letter now people use it to just print | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a tool to send a letter now people use it to just print

pieterpost.com

28 pointsbahrtw23 comments

What a nice idea! A few questions out of curiosity:

* Do you plan to somehow collaborate with local post offices/companies/partners in order to avoid long-distance trips and increase the efficiency of the delivery?

* How will the delivery fee be calculated? Will it be roughly fixed or will it increase according to the distance/remoteness?

I already partner with a print company to increase speed and efficiency of the delivery. For now I just keep a minimum fee of 2 for the first page and 0,50 for the other pages. This works fine for now :)

How do you know people send the hard copy to themselves?

Edit: love the (Dutch) name!

I regularly use superpost.com which is a similar service, although a little cheaper. A very good experience. Although I can never remember their name when I need it ;) Too general I guess. I keep your service in mind for my next letter.

Did a little survey on what people are actually using the website for and this was not quite the outcome I expected!

Thanks for the compliment, and really cool to hear there are other services like this out there :)

In France the post office does that for you. You send them a PDF and they print it, stamp it and deliver it.

As a bonus you get traceability.

heard about that! My experience is that in France they still use a lot of traditional stuff like cheques, but this is really cool.

We are right in the technological middle ages in our administration or banks.

The national post is there too, except for a few things like these.

And yes we still use cheques, and this actually hinders evolution in banking.

Yes, I just looked at the website of the French Post. And I am a little bit shocked how many templates they have for administrative processes.. (Demarches administratives - 37). Looks like they need a good Post service because people still need to send a lot of important letters by physical mail..

So many things are done in France via un petit courrier - "a little (snail) mail"...

We have printing kiosks, in places like public libraries, that are particularly popular with students. They are inexpensive (0.10€ a page in colour) and good quality (laser).

Who can afford to have a printer at home?

I made a tool to send letters and now people use it to just print. What was the last thing you printed?

What do you mean exactly? They just print some documents they need and get them mailed to themselves?

Yes! So my assumption is people don’t have printers anymore and want a easy way to print if they have or want to.

They just add files like a .pdf and let them send to their homes. So they have real physical prints..

This reminds of Google Paper in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_April_Fools%27_... I know at least 2 people who were fooled by it haha.

Haha, that’s a good one! I promise it’s real – otherwise, it would be a very late April Fool’s joke!

I print and platicize a lot of food recipes and maps for boy (and girl) scouts.

Nice! You have a printer yourself?

Yes, only cheap black and white laser printer, nothing fancy.

Copies of all the documents I need to give to my accountant to assemble my taxes. Likely around 100 pages or so.

So you bring them to your accountant and he scans them? You do around 100 pages every quarter? May I ask where you are living that he needs hardcopy?

No, I scan them and print the copies. My accountant is paper only and it's a yearly thing, not a quarterly thing. I live in the boonies.

I printed out an application form and had it delivered to a physical drop box at the Indian Railways office (they don’t accept email) via Blinkit (Indian quick commerce app, which does print+delivery in 10 minutes.).

That sounds interesting and superfast! Would be cool to use that! "The need was very selfish - we all felt that sporadic printing should not be a burden that occupies permanent space in our lives only to fail us when we really need it. Our existing distribution network also enabled us to deliver high-quality printouts to our customers at their doorsteps in minutes."

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