Hacker News Reader

Comment by ericglyman | Hacker News Reader

Hey Chris, one of the founders of Paribus here. Totally understand where you're coming from. One of our key goals is to make a service that's so easy to use that you never have to think about it (it will work in the background to save you money on all your purchases).

Something that we often recommend is to create a separate email account for just your online purchases and promotions. That way you can have the benefits of automated price protection on your purchases, and fully separate your personal account. Happy to chat anytime on this too -- eric@paribus.co

View on HN

Would it be possible to provide an address that receipts could be forwarded to? Similar to how Tripit works where you forward travel plans to plans@tripit.com and they are connected to your account based on the sender address. Reciepts could still be sent automatically by creating an auto forward rule.

Most people use Gmail, which doesn't have auto-forward capabilities. (intentionally, I think)

You can auto-forward if you can confirm ownership (or at least control, by clicking a link) of the address.

False. Forwarding is an action you can set on any filter.

Instead, setup a forwarding email address were people can just forward receipts to you. With some care people can create rules to do it automatically.

That's a possibility, but managing a separate email account just to use your product isn't a workable solution for many people. I'm sure you're aware of http://camelcamelcamel.com/camelizer ; could you do something similar?

Absolutely. It's a good point, but I think that option is actually even more of a hassle in practice.

From much more experience doing this than I ever imagine I'd have, having to enter each and every purchase manually, deal with alerts, and then manually go back and forth with customer service is painful. There's more work to do on our end (we're early stage). But extreme user simplicity is what we're going for.

Providing an option for manual forwarding for power users or the slightly paranoid would be nice. I use a paid email service (Fastmail) to minimize data mining, so I can't just make a new account for online shopping. I'd have to either pay for a new account or set up a free one, but giving my purchase history to Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, would largely defeat the purpose of my paid email account. Amazon already collects enough data on me.

I really like the idea of the service, though. It just doesn't work for me as it is right now...

That's a possibility, but managing a separate email account just to use your product isn't a workable solution for many people.

Until you save one person a couple of thousands on a large purchase. I wonder if they could do this with car purchases or similar high-ticket items.

Something that we often recommend is to create a separate email account for just your online purchases and promotions.

If the user would forward things to this account (either manually or automatically) that would work, but few, if any, places make a distinction between your ability to login and the identity you use to receive email, so you couldn't divorce the authentication from the notification. This account would also get password recovery emails, for example, and potentially expose more than just the receipt emails. It would partition the more personal stuff, but is only a partial solution.

Manual forwarding seems like a sensible solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com