SendWrite launches API for physical mail

by colevscode • 15 years ago

69 35 15 years ago

jjacobson2• 15 years ago

An API for creating and sending physical things feels just plain awesome, even though on a fundamental level ecommerce APIs do the same thing. Nice work.

Urgo• 15 years ago

What I need is an api to tell me when there's mail in my PO box.

ericd4• 15 years ago

Earth Class Mail? I don't know if they have an API - they do have web access and web-based mail reading, though.

tapp• 15 years ago

No API yet, but they do send you an email notification.

dongle• 15 years ago

Neat. Maybe I'll write a script to scrape my Google calendar and automatically send birthday cards. Can see companies using this to send a personal note to their best customers.

app8288• 15 years ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but that's a great idea.

inuhj• 15 years ago

I am building this right now actually ;).

codeslush• 15 years ago

Check this older thread out, along with comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300711 -- maybe some synergy?

cdcarter• 15 years ago

With a single card costing just under $3 USD, this isn't an API I think I'll be playing around with until I've got a really good idea, but I can't wait to actually come up with something good.

colevscode2• 15 years ago

Shoot me an email at cole (at) sendwrite.com and I'll send you a few free cards to play with.

askedrelic• 15 years ago

My current idea is a bit arty, something like: style for a month.

For 30 days, each day, scrape yesterday's image from http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/ or http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/ (or just pick one at random) and use the API to mail it myself. Eventually, I'll be getting a postcard a card of cool style and get a cool physical collection.

I've seen this similarly with Flickr: email me each day with a photo I took 1 year ago (or some random old photo I took), so you always filtering through your old collection. But maybe postcards will feel differently.

tonywebster• 15 years ago

I think this is really cool and most definitely needed, but I think it needs to have more than just cards. Certified Mail is a huge requirement for a lot of businesses and right now there's no great solution for automating that -- at least nothing with any friendliness to developers.

screeny• 15 years ago

Love the idea. Wish there were more specs on the physical product. Sample shots, for example.

ericd4• 15 years ago

I can see a ton of uses for this. Birthday cards, thank you cards for customers, physical appointment reminders for doctors/dentists, having petitions and online organizations that send harder-to-ignore physical mail to your congress people.

With full color printing this becomes even more interesting - direct mailing campaigns become feasible (if expensive) for startups, even with customization.

jonpaul• 15 years ago

There was another service that did this and did it well. But apparently it isn't around anymore. It was called Mail Finch. Here is the Mixergy interview, IMHO it's great: http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/

dougb• 15 years ago

The first I heard of a service like this was letters.com back in 1994. My friend started it. He ended up selling the domain for 5 figures and went on to do the webcounter at digits.com.

jaylevitt• 15 years ago

AOL used TeleMail/SprintMail for this around 1992; Sprint provided an X.400 gateway to both fax and US postal mail, but IIRC the postal mail gateway cost something like $1/page and so nobody ever used it:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Qa6bcZ0HuVUC&lpg=PA7...

russell_h• 15 years ago

This looks awesome. I have a bunch of thank you cards that I need to send (or rather, I should have sent 3 months ago), so I may give it a shot. My one concern is that you don't seem to get much control over formatting, as far as I can tell the entire message is just a big string.

colevscode2• 15 years ago

Hi russell. Right now the formatting is pretty simple. You can use whitespace to break up the message or indent a paragraph. We're currently working on a card designer interface that will allow much more customization. If you have any specific requests please shoot me an email at cole (at) sendwrite.com.

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

Personally, I'd like to just upload a PDF of the appropriate size for your card stock, and use my own formatting tools to produce that PDF.

(This looks awesome, by the way.)

Ein2015• 15 years ago

PostalMethods has been doing this for years. http://www.postalmethods.com/

stfu• 15 years ago

Awesome idea. There can be never enough interesting APIs around. I once talked to a marketing guy who told me a tale about a campaign he did were he got a bunch of housewives to write handwritten letters to a few hundred core decision makers. Received extremely high response rates through this unusual approach. Just mentioning it as a random idea - would be fun if people could send out actually hand written cards through the service.

wizard_2• 15 years ago

I wanted something like this a few years back for small scale billing. I decided to partner with a local print shop who was able to get me a good pricing on 2 color prints and envelops. I never was able to find a place with a good API that handled low quantity orders with a reasonable price. ($0.45 a bill)

Sendwrite is too expensive (obviously has a different target audience). I had to sign up to get prices.

  1 Card - $2.99
  3 Cards - $7.99
  10 Cards - $24.99
  20 Cards - $39.80

ericd4• 15 years ago

$0.45 per bill? Surely that wasn't the shipped price you were looking for - stamps alone are 0.44 each... On top of that, it's a very labor intensive service.

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

Metered mail costs significantly less than stamped mail. A quick check with the USPS suggests a price of $0.237 per piece. That makes $0.45 per piece pretty reasonable for a fully automated service, assuming a human never needs to touch individual pieces of mail.

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

They give a quick order of magnitude on their front page without signing up: https://sendwrite.com/ mentions "as low as $1.99 per card in a pack of 20".

a3camero• 15 years ago

Just US? I don't see any info on international mail.

danielamitay• 15 years ago

A "Hello World" example might take a while to pan out.

jjacobson2• 15 years ago

I know you have a image preview on the site. Returning that through the API would be cool too.

JoshTriplett4• 15 years ago

This looks awesome; I've wanted a service for sending mail for a while. Cards seem like a nice place to start; hopefully they'll expand to a few other form factors in the future.

Personally, I'd love to see this for a couple of data-related use cases: mailing either USB disks or CDs based on an uploaded image.

nitrogen• 15 years ago

Back in 2001, a sufficiently large company could upload a .iso to an FTP server, and Cinram (or other disc burning companies) would burn and ship on demand. I'm pretty sure they had a web API that was integrated into the ordering backend of my employer at the time.

URSpider94• 15 years ago

http://www.cd-fulfillment.com/self-publish-cd-dvd.asp

There are others, this is one I found quickly.

alexchamberlain• 15 years ago

The UK has several companies doing this. For example, http://www.cfhdocmail.com/

seanahrens• 15 years ago

love it. keep up the great work, cole. let me know when it can automatically prompt me to mail for my friend/family's birthdays.

SendWrite launches API for physical mail

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