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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

* You're doing things that are (or seem) trivial to do oneself. I'm not convinced this stuff is really hard to do myself, so why would I pay to make it easier? Maybe you can remind me how hard it actually is. There are lots of nasty little problems with these things that memory masks.

* It's not particularly cheap (vs doing it yourself which is effectively free for most delivery methods). Maybe you could compare yourself with other options. Maybe you're better in some ways, so it justifies being more expensive.

* I think a lot of people may only need one or two of the delivery methods. Maybe you can convince me I should be utilizing other delivery mechanisms to reach my users. How would it help me to do so?

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Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. You've raised some great questions.

I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.

You should be convinced after reading our homepage that it is worth your money and maybe the current copy doesn't reflect that well enough. We'll keep iterating on that, gather more data points, analyze it, highlight success stories of integration, etc...

Thx for your suggestions.

I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.

Don't tell that to us here. Say that in a convincing manner on the homepage.

If this isn't your core business, it's not just about technical difficulty. It's also about time, maintenance, and ROI on the implementation.

Are you saying that DIY is a clear win in terms of those costs as well?

What I took from his post was that he was pointing out that DIY is an option for most potential customers of this service. Explaining why this service is a win in the terms you mention such as time/maintenance/ROI for DIY is necessary to convince users to purchase.

Point taken; I see how our resource contraints make us an easier sale, but others may be more able to devote development time to this.

Agreed for some things. But in most languages it's one line to send an email, sms, gtalk message etc. I honestly couldn't believe they were trying to charge for email sending or other messages that do not cost money to anyone?

Best of luck to them, but pass.

I think the "it is one line of code" needs to be challenged. If you want a reliable, white-listed mail service, it is a whole bunch of upfront and ongoing work with postmasters to deliver a high successful-delivery rate service to your users.

And that's just one example.

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