Lob (YC S13) Debuts a Cloud Printing and Shipping Service for Developers | Hacker News Reader

Lob (YC S13) Debuts a Cloud Printing and Shipping Service for Developers

techcrunch.com

86 pointsharryzhang45 comments

I don't have much domain knowledge, but the pricing seems rather high:

https://www.lob.com/pricing

$.45 for a black and white piece of paper is on the high end, especially considering they're acting as a middleman.

Keep in mind this includes an 4 sheets of B&W, the envelope, packaging, and labor costs associated with stuffing it into an letter, addressing it, and then mailing it. So $0.45 for one sheet is not exactly correct.

Isn't the stuffing automated? Heck I've seen some awesome machinery that takes bulk mail (assorted sizes), OCRs the info, opens it, retrieves the letter (check in this case)and then scans that for processing (putting aside illegible / odd cases).

Yes but what is the cost of those machines? And what is the cost of the service that uses those machines?

The pricing page is intimidating.

The pricing is absolutely insane.

$.85 for a 4x6 photo?

Winkflash charges $.06, which makes Lob 14 times more expensive.

And for what? Because you have an API?

Although their pricing is a bit high I feel there is clear trend supporting higher price for convenience.

This is the same trail that Stripe blazed. For a little bit of work I could get my own merchant account setup with much lower processing rates but the ease of integration and time savings is worth the cost.

I don't see Lob being that useful for people already doing printing. But I do see it offering a simplicity that will enable a whole new set of business to use printing in creative ways (ours included). Again, somewhat similar to Stripe.

I use AmazingMail's API and they have been great:

http://www.amazingmail.com/direct-mail-automation

Pricing is much cheaper. Main downside is there is a rather sizable one-time setup fee. But for printing, you are going to need to work with support to ensure things are working well, so this support is what you are paying for.

Feedback on the website: There is currently no Terms of Service. There is a Privacy Policy posted, but the TOS is not there. Your PP says, "This Privacy Policy is governed by our Terms of Service", so I would post one immediately.

That's a little scary to be honest.

I wouldn't necessarily call is scary, they're a start-up and early stage at that, probably just an oversight. Plus, they mention in the TechCrunch article that right now it's literally just the 2 of them, I'm sure they'll get one up soon!

Does anyone know where I could find a list of API's as a product?

examples that I can think of:

Stripe

Lob

EligibleAPI

Factual

I like http://www.programmableweb.com

EasyPost is another one (in this same YC batch)

Cant edit my original comment, but this is a fairly comprehensive list: https://angel.co/developer-apis

This is a great idea. I have a tight relationship with the printer I use at http://www.cheergram.com and we are thinking of doing something similar.

I know several pro print labs and Lob's prices are a bit high. On the other hand, small run printing can be a pain. Most printers I know have minimum orders on photo prints and press products like cards have to be done in groups of 25 or 100. Also, most printers will ship to their client for free but charge a fee to drop-ship.

All-in-all, the pricing isn't terrible but you have to find some kind of specialty/niche to make it work. I don't think you could do much with just a basic "print this thing" service built on top of this.

Here's one lab I know of that actually publishes their pricing: http://www.nationsphotolab.com/prints.aspx

Interesting. Doesn't printagram do printing and packaging in-house? I would think you'd need to in order to greatly increase margin.

So this is similar to http://theprintful.com ?

I can't make sense of the pricing page, is the cost for shipping included in the "packaging"-price?

Do you ship worldwide?

How long does it take until my order is in my customers mailbox?

Good feedback on the pricing page. We're working on a revamp of it now.

We ship worldwide and takes us 2 days to process/print the order...then the only variable is shipping time based on the speed you want (so overnight to ground depending how fast you need it).

What's the use case for this? I guess it'd be more useful the deeper you get into their pricing structure such as with photos or business cards; but it doesn't seem like its priced all that competitively with established services.

If this were a price-attractive campaign mailing tool...well then we're in a whole different ballgame. I could see Scrooge McDuck vaults of money being made in disrupting the last true bastion of postal mailing services.

One example that came immediately to mind was invoices. I work with some clients who prefer snail mail bills over email.

Freshbooks will snailmail your invoices.

for what it's worth I've tried this service about 3 weeks ago. I printed a sample postcard to test the quality. It was better than I expected, especially coming from a pdf. At the time there was no way to print a two sided job (it's probably supported now), but they accommodated my request and gave me a ton of paper options that weren't available through the api.

Long story short, awesome customer experience and quality result.

Two sided is supported now! And thank you for using Lob!

I used these guys for some fliers the other day and they were actually really beautiful. Very approachable and great customer service. I highly recommend them!

Offtopic... but I'd love to hear the story of how they acquired a 3-letter domain. That seems like quite a feat for a young startup.

http://blog.lob.com/post/55544977604/the-art-of-a-3-letter-d...

What I'd like to know is how the hell do you get a 1 letter domain, like x.com? They're the only company I've ever come across with one. You would think it would be worth it for some highly funded startup to pay the premium a 1 letter domain would command, because it certainly would be novel and attention getting to be something like z.com.

They are reserved by ICANN, however there are a few around. x.com is Paypal, q.com is owned by Centurylink and z.com is owned by Nissan (although doesn't resolve right now). You could theoretically purchase q, x or z.com from the current owners, otherwise it's impossible to register them. I guess theoretically a very well funded company could try and bribe ICANN to release one to them, but that seems exceptionally unlikely.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_doma...

This looks like a good service. We currently use Pwinty (www.pwinty.com) which is operating in the same space. They are very good and we are very happy with the service. If you think Lob is a good fit for your app do take a look at Pwinty too, they have been running for about a year and have fulfilment centres in both the us and uk.

Similarly, we use trypaper for some integrations and they've been great to work with. It's great to see all this competition in this space.

thanks :) we love working with our users!

Anyone knows the shipping & postage cost for their services? I couldn't find any details on their page.

Postage is .46 for letter, .33 cents for postcard, everything that is shipped varies on destination. We ship worldwide.

Where can I find out the pricing on shipping for each destination?

I signed up for this last weekend, and had great followups with Harry Zhang, one of the co-founders. Super impressed with the customer service / support.

Thanks for the kind words Dave!

I have been watching this since launch, I think it is a great concept. Really looking forward to seeing it develop.

very simple to use. i was in charge of developing their PHP client: https://github.com/lob/lob-php

and already thinking into something that could use lob's potential. :)

Very impressive URL.

I assume one of the founders already owned it?

Nope, they're just hustlers http://blog.lob.com/post/55544977604/the-art-of-a-3-letter-d...

They actually wrote about their experience here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6060942

Huh, I thought Jon Wheatley (Founder of Dailybooth, YC) owned it (lob.com) for a long time (April 2012), it was listed on his website for a while and a landing page for something he was working on for well over a year. I assumed that they bought it from him (with YC "buddy" pricing).

Where is the pricing for stickers?

Go Blue!

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