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Funny, I feel that some interesting online tools have little business being online: Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails

Funny, I feel that some interesting online tools have little business being online: Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates. There are many such examples of services which don't really need to be online, but they want that monthly payment. Furthermore, I remember buying SpaceMonkey. It was a great idea, except that I had this 2tb hard drive that was just sitting around being unable to be used because I refused to pay a yearly $50 fee. I ended up just prying it open and using the hard drive (mind you, you pay for the drive too). One positive one is WesternDigital's NAS drive (my cloud). It has a feature you can turn on to use it as a "cloud storage device", but that is an optional feature which you don't have to use, instead you can have it 100% local NAS, or turn it on (granted from a security perspective, I'd rather NOT have it open to the open internet)

doublerebel 11y ago
Have you ever used sendwithus to grow a startup? They are an invaluable service that does far more than A/B emails. WYSIWYG email composer, comprehensive metrics, great deliverability, super easy API. There is no way we could have spent the labor at anywhere near the low cost. Companies who don't understand the value of these services are quickly left behind by those who do. Sure, there are some overpriced SaaS, but the rest are successful because they are correctly priced.
vonklaus 11y ago
> Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates. I have only experimented a bit with these services and am not actively marketing, but it is my understanding that there are several reasons to use them: > you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates. * You can run your own git/github repo, make your own irc setup and write your own javascript framework but you can get to market faster using React, github and slack. * Mail is annoying from what I understand. You can have your servers blacklisted pretty quickly even if you are simply trying to do casual email, this is abstracted away. * I have build email templates, and it is pretty annoying because cross compatibility is hell. The assumptions and basic template I used to put together my email was from a service like this, I think mailgun. They keep updated info on compatibility and provide free templates and inline tooling to get this done quick even if you don;t use the service. However, if no one used the service these resources would have to be found from various blogs, etc. More time not developing. * Building tracking and programatic email generation and transactional logic is probably not so trivial that the free for < 10K email limit most providers have would make the engineering spend worth it. So the point is, some services are useful because they provide more value than building them in house. I have never used spacemonkey but the value prop is you can keep your data locally and back it up yourself. If you didn't want to pay the fees you could just buy 1 (or if you wanted redundancey) 2 drives and do it yourself. The value propositions are presented up front. The real issue is when these services pivot or change and you are left in the lurch.

doublerebel 11y ago

Have you ever used sendwithus to grow a startup? They are an invaluable service that does far more than A/B emails. WYSIWYG email composer, comprehensive metrics, great deliverability, super easy API. There is no way we could have spent the labor at anywhere near the low cost. Companies who don't understand the value of these services are quickly left behind by those who do. Sure, there are some overpriced SaaS, but the rest are successful because they are correctly priced.

vonklaus 11y ago

> Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates. I have only experimented a bit with these services and am not actively marketing, but it is my understanding that there are several reasons to use them: > you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates. * You can run your own git/github repo, make your own irc setup and write your own javascript framework but you can get to market faster using React, github and slack. * Mail is annoying from what I understand. You can have your servers blacklisted pretty quickly even if you are simply trying to do casual email, this is abstracted away. * I have build email templates, and it is pretty annoying because cross compatibility is hell. The assumptions and basic template I used to put together my email was from a service like this, I think mailgun. They keep updated info on compatibility and provide free templates and inline tooling to get this done quick even if you don;t use the service. However, if no one used the service these resources would have to be found from various blogs, etc. More time not developing. * Building tracking and programatic email generation and transactional logic is probably not so trivial that the free for < 10K email limit most providers have would make the engineering spend worth it. So the point is, some services are useful because they provide more value than building them in house. I have never used spacemonkey but the value prop is you can keep your data locally and back it up yourself. If you didn't want to pay the fees you could just buy 1 (or if you wanted redundancey) 2 drives and do it yourself. The value propositions are presented up front. The real issue is when these services pivot or change and you are left in the lurch.