Show HN: Outbound - A single events API for emails, push, sms, and voice | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Outbound - A single events API for emails, push, sms, and voice

outbound.io

59 pointsdhruvkaran24 comments

Empower your product manager. Let them decide what the messages to your users say, when those messages are triggered, as well as how they are sent (sms, email, etc.) while you focus on building product features. They'll be able to use trusted providers like sendgrid, twilio and apple so you don't have to worry about message delivery.

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There's no mention of using Google authentication anywhere other than after clicking the login or sign-up buttons and you get the oAuth permissions/Google login page.

Also, if you cancel the oAuth request, you get an internal server error:

http://www.outbound.io/oauth2callback?error=access_denied

We are working on a non-google signup flow. Most SMBs in our test group seemed to be ok with Google login. This has changed as our acquisition channel changed. Stay tuned for more updates.

Why the hell would anyone give away sensitive customer information like that to a free service?! There is ZERO incentive for them to do anything good with MY information once you give it to them. Even if the current owner is conscientious, if they sell their site the buyer probably won't be. I don't want to be goddamn robocalled at 6AM because you're too cheap to pay for the work needed to set up these services properly.

Web services as an industry needs to grow up. "Free" is totally inappropriate for this.

Valid concern.

We started building this a few weeks ago. Pricing is something that's relatively tricky in the SaaS world. We are excited to show you our work while we figure that out.

Please get in touch and we will be happy to walk you through the pricing possibilities.

It wasn't clear to me if you require me to provide my Twilio/Sendgrid accounts? That's a deal breaker for most, I imagine.

Why not push those costs to developers and use your own accounts to send the messages?

Start charging today. You shouldn't care about developers that are only looking for a free service and there are plenty who would prefer to pay.

You can do a trial, of course.

This game is about trust. If you're not MailChimp then you have to figure out how you're going to gain it. Customer.io gained my trust by calling me on the phone and having a conversation with me before I even signed up.

All good points.

We are figuring out our pricing schemes and will definitely be charging for the service. While we figure it out, it'll remain free.

Multiple people have asked for us to white label the providers. But the providers have built a great suite of tools which provide you delivery insights. Once we can roll in that value, we will look into it again. For now, we will be focussing on a more streamlined flow to create your own provider accounts. But we do take your point of there being friction in creating other accounts and will be working on that.

Integrating with SendGrid requires me to share my Sendgrid username and password. When asking for the password, a plain text field is being used as opposed to as password field. Anyone else find that insecure?

That and no SSL. The service looks very interesting otherwise. We've been looking at building something similar to unify how all systems communicate with customers.

Fixed.

I love the password dots. People really don't seem to understand that just because you see dots doesn't mean that the field is secure. They really only protect you from people staring over your shoulder, it seems.

The screenshots near the top definitely look like part of the web page -- I tried clicking them at first. A border of some sort might help distinguish it (I didn't see the three dots at the bottom at first, and most laptop screens probably won't be able to see it either).

"Learn More" pops up a new tab, new subdomain, and a completely inconsistent brand / style. Your logo doesn't even show up on this page. Ditch the outgoing link feel and keep your website consistent.

Thank you for your feedback. We've heard feedback on that page and the work is in progress.

In the blog there are links which appear to be dead links for Heroku.

Here is one: http://signup.outbound.io/#4

Fax would be a nice addition. It's antiquated, I know, but still widely used in many industries. Hard to find a good outbound fax API. Anyone have any recommendations?

Phaxio

Thanks kvee! Check us out http://phaxio.com -- we're a modern, RESTful, fax API. Let me know if you have any questions (email in profile).

Your Email icon looks suspiciously like Customer.io's logo...

We guess Sparrow (acquired by Google now) just started a paper plane trend!

I can't find a pricing page anywhere.

The service in free in beta. We will be introducing our pricing tiers relatively soon. Please get in touch with founders@outbound.io for more details.

At tonido, we plan to build a system similar to yours to handle our incoming leads. We would appreciate if you have put up a pricing page probably with a free trial for a week. We wont trust a free service.

The service in free only in early beta. We will be introducing our pricing tiers relatively soon. Please get in touch with founders@outbound.io for more details. We are happy to talk through the possibilities.

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