8 ms·

PopcornNotify – Send simple emails and text messages from one API

218 points by FriedPickles 9y ago

paulrosenzweig 9y ago
I _love_ the simplicity. Really well done project.
kraig911 9y ago
Can't easily find how much it costs? I definitely want to try it out :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- ollerac 9y ago
  Pricing: API keys cost $10 for each 1,000 messages and last one year. It's right above the BUY API KEY button.
  - juancampa 9y ago
    I don't see it either. Maybe an A/B experiment gone wrong?
    - Moter8 9y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/h7gtV4L.png https://i.imgur.com/h7gtV4L.png It's just fairly small and not distinguished.
PhilipA 9y ago
I like the clear messaging - do you want more complex/advanced options go elsewhere. You even link to the competitors. Well done.
mahesh_rm 9y ago
Great Simple Project. Does this send SMS all over the world, or just US and/or Europe?
- 534b44a 9y ago
  Probably US only. The cheapest EU prices I'm used to are normally around x5 more expensive for SMS.
aezell 9y ago
That pricing isn't too bad for SMS messages but it is VERY high for emails. Simplicity has value but I'm not sure it has that much value.
- a13n 9y ago
  It's basically 10x what Mailgun charges, which is pretty reasonable overhead imo. $10 to send 1,000 email notifications to your team is peanuts. People will 100% pay that.
  - classics2 9y ago
    Why would I pay to send an email?
    - CodeWriter23 9y ago
      Deliverability.
      - drdaeman 9y ago
        I'd argue, something like Mailgun/SendGrid/alikes are not really better than e.g. my home mail server. I mean, both land in spam at random and there is literally nothing one can do about it, except trying to randomly tinker with things (message content and headers, or, maybe, change IPs) in hope it will somehow help.
        CodeWriter23 9y ago
        I'd argue having a home mail server is nothing like sending email for a business. If your business sends out any kind of transactional emails, the Junkie McJunkbuttons of the interwebs will trash your domain and IP reputation because they use the Junk button as the Delete button. Why does this matter? Please, let me invite you in to this rabbit hole. What I say here is based on information my best friend, who is an engineer working on email transport for a national ISP. And let me tell you, blacklists like Spamhaus, SORBS, etc. and code like SpamAssassin are the Tonka toys of spam filtering. 1. The storage for their mail system is close to 1PB of usable storage via RAID 60 storage modules in their SAN. It's a lot of drives. A lot of Enterprise-class, high RPM, expensive drives. 2. The SAN stores about 3% of all email they receive. This is not because their users are all about Inbox Zero. No, this is because they route ~97% of their received email straight into the bit bucket. Because it is clearly SPAM. Think about that 1PB of storage being multiplied to 33PB just because SPAMmers want to send email. Think about even larger ISP/ESPs that operate at much larger scale and face 97% influx of utter crap. 3. Keeping up with the constantly-evolving threat models used by SPAMmers is too much for just about any engineering team that wants to get some real work done, so they outsource the filtering. These are companies like CloudMark and Symantec to name a couple. They provide APIs where you send an email, and they return an extensive SPAMminess profile for that message. They are the Caterpillar 797F's of SPAM filtering. These companies are used by numerous other companies, so SPAM reported at one customer site aids detection at all customer sites. BTW, they have no page to log in where you can request removal from their blacklist. 4. Since false positives on classifying mail as Junk (the Junk that actually gets to the Junk box) is a huge drain on support resources, they decided to employ two such companies from the Email Filtering Industry. This is because they get different profiles from each company. They glued the two results together in multivariate tests until they found the right formula to significantly reduce the "SPAM False Positive" type of support inquiry. 5. When someone hits the Junk button in their webmail client, the ISP reports that email to both of their Email Filtering partners. These filtering companies can extrapolate the volume of email your domain sends because they see those emails as they are received by their customers. They can also track how many times a user reports it as SPAM. A few SPAM reports won't hurt your domain/IP reputation, but once you hit a certain threshold, you're blacklisted across all their customers. So what Mailgun or SendGrid can do for a customer in this ecosphere is use their relationships with the CloudMarks and Symantecs of the world. And gain some forbearance to to de-blacklist customers who are sending legit email, or who suffered an incident and were exploited by SPAMmers. I've witnessed this happening on the ConvertKit Facebook group multiple times. A marketer posts that suddenly their emails aren't reaching their canary accounts, say at Gmail. CK support gets in and says they'll contact their email provider. A day later, problem resolved and said marketer reports their mails being delivered again. So where does Junkie McJunkbutton come in to all of this? Well, they are usually non-hostile people who don't understand the implications of hitting the Junk Button. That they are essentially reporting a bad faith email event to the "Equifaxes of the email world" about you. PS Junkie McJunkbutton + going it alone for email transport is what will kill PopcornNotify and similar solutions.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ollerac 9y ago
Although I truly think this is a fantastic product, both in the simplicity of the offering and the simplicity of the API, I was a little concerned about being able to use my own domain and phone number when sending messages, for the sake of building trust with my users. Also, I (selfishly, perhaps) have more faith in the reliability of an established service than something recently launched. For anyone who has similar concerns and wants to use something more customizable and reliable like Mailgun/Twilio, but wants access to the same elegant API showcased here, you can use something like this (admittedly naive) implementation: const mailgun = require('mailgun-js')({apiKey: api_key, domain: domain}); const twilio = new require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken); export default function notify (to, msg, options) { if (Array.isArray(to)) { to.forEach((toSingle) => notify(toSingle, msg, options)); return; } if (to.includes("@")) { mailgun.messages().send({ from: 'Your name <yourname@example.com>', // your email to: to, subject: options && options.subject, text: msg }); } else { twilioClient.messages.create({ body: msg, to: to, from: '+5555555555' // your number }); } } This implementation wouldn't require that much extra effort to set up initially (i.e. signing up for two API credentials instead of one and installing two packages instead of one), but it gives you a lot more flexibility to configure the from address and phone number and might help you sleep easier at night. However, as a fellow startup founder, I think it's noble to support newer projects like this. As such, I've signed up for an account and plan to test it out for at least a month.
- kevsim 9y ago
  > Also, I (selfishly, perhaps) have more faith in the reliability of an established service than something recently launched. This was my thought as well. I've had a number of projects where I had to deliver large numbers of emails and SMS and the problem has never been the design of the API I used to send them. It's always about the delivery rates of those messages. Particularly with SMS we've had to be very careful with our providers, often needing to select a different one in different countries.
- igammarays 9y ago
  Yeah, you are probably not the target market for this lovely hobby project. Email service reliability matters, and is a very difficult problem at scale. This is why my team has been working on a production-ready, enterprise version of a unified email API for about a year now, that's free for up to 100k messages/month, and has functionality that you couldn't easily build yourself, like auto-failover over multiple providers, full-text elasticsearch of your email history/logs, and a non-technical interface for your customer support team to easily view your recipients email history. Send me a tweet @flutemail if you're interested, I'll let you know when it's ready (should be in about a month).
needcaffeine 9y ago
Great product! FYI that your terms page is broken: https://popcornnotify.com/terms https://popcornnotify.com/terms
skrebbel 9y ago
I think this is a nice idea, but I'm worried about the, let's be honest, needless single point of failure this adds to my architecture. Nothing this does ought to be more than a 100 line open source project (which is not criticism btw - if you can monetize a tiny codebase, more power to you!). But because it's SaaS, you need to depend on someone else to keep their service up and running. Because of that simple reason, I'd only use this for optional stuff, but I struggle to think of a use case where notifications are optional. ps. that said, this is a very attractive service to send SMS to Europe. I know of no service that undercuts $0.10 per SMS to European countries unless you buy in huge bulks.
- vortico 9y ago
  You could implement your own so that at least you're in control of your single point of failure.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > I know of no service that undercuts $0.10 per SMS to European countries unless you buy in huge bulks. Twilio looks to be under $0.10 for more than a few european countries I checked: https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/ch https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/ch https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/de https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/de https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/es https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/es https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/se https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/se https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/fi https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/fi https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/nl https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/nl
  - skrebbel 9y ago
    Oh wow! Things got cheaper since last I checked, thanks!
    - mgkimsal 9y ago
      Cool. I've noticed a couple of price drops in the last couple of years, although I don't do any european SMS right now, it's good to know. Looks like plivo has some good rates too: https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ES/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ES/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FR/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FR/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FI/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FI/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/SE/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/SE/#!sms The monthly cost of a number with plivo seems a bit higher, overall, but also looks like they have free incoming SMS, which may end up being a much better deal for some use cases.
nautical 9y ago
Hi FriedPickles, Great product first of all, liked the simplicity of the product, I am also working on somewhat similar product, https://ingwe.io https://ingwe.io . I am planning to launch on hn in couple of days, best of luck :)
- piyushgururani 9y ago
  Nice, liked the fact that I can use API responses in templates. Will check it out too.
- Akhilma93 9y ago
  Is this available to use right now? Would like to have a demo
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - nautical 9y ago
    Yes, please go ahead signup, its free for starting couple of days. Ping me on help anytime.
kMitnick18 9y ago
Which countries supports sending SMS?
nicky0 9y ago
I can't find information on which countries text messages can be delivered to.
thomasdd 9y ago
Found v=spf1 record for email.popcornnotify.com: v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all
- melq 9y ago
  To those less familiar with email standards.. this means the 3rd party service send grid are the ones actually sending mail on their behalf. More specifically, SPF exists for a domain owner (in this case, popcornnotify.com) to specify who is authorized to send mail on behalf of the host email.popcornnotify.com. This is set in a DNS record and used by spam filters to prevent spoofing and such.
borplk 9y ago
FYI link to Twilio is broken.
vortico 9y ago
Seems to be a quarter of the price of https://textbelt.com/ https://textbelt.com/
matchilling 9y ago
Really like the simplicity of the project, well executed ! Good luck with it and I hope that you will resist any feature requests which will turn the product into another Mailgun/ Twilio etc. There is an audience for every (useful) product!
davidcamel 9y ago
I love how simple this is, but does it support including email attachments? I couldn't determine that based on the content of the website. EDIT: similarly, does it support MMS in addition to SMS?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
mlrtime 9y ago
Why not just amazon sns to send sms? A few lines of boto code and you're running.

218 points by FriedPickles 9y ago

paulrosenzweig 9y ago

I _love_ the simplicity. Really well done project.

kraig911 9y ago

Can't easily find how much it costs? I definitely want to try it out :)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ollerac 9y ago
Pricing: API keys cost $10 for each 1,000 messages and last one year. It's right above the BUY API KEY button.
- juancampa 9y ago
  I don't see it either. Maybe an A/B experiment gone wrong?
  - Moter8 9y ago
    https://i.imgur.com/h7gtV4L.png https://i.imgur.com/h7gtV4L.png It's just fairly small and not distinguished.

PhilipA 9y ago

I like the clear messaging - do you want more complex/advanced options go elsewhere. You even link to the competitors. Well done.

mahesh_rm 9y ago

Great Simple Project. Does this send SMS all over the world, or just US and/or Europe?

534b44a 9y ago
Probably US only. The cheapest EU prices I'm used to are normally around x5 more expensive for SMS.

aezell 9y ago

That pricing isn't too bad for SMS messages but it is VERY high for emails. Simplicity has value but I'm not sure it has that much value.

a13n 9y ago
It's basically 10x what Mailgun charges, which is pretty reasonable overhead imo. $10 to send 1,000 email notifications to your team is peanuts. People will 100% pay that.
- classics2 9y ago
  Why would I pay to send an email?
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    Deliverability.
    - drdaeman 9y ago
      I'd argue, something like Mailgun/SendGrid/alikes are not really better than e.g. my home mail server. I mean, both land in spam at random and there is literally nothing one can do about it, except trying to randomly tinker with things (message content and headers, or, maybe, change IPs) in hope it will somehow help.
      - CodeWriter23 9y ago
        I'd argue having a home mail server is nothing like sending email for a business. If your business sends out any kind of transactional emails, the Junkie McJunkbuttons of the interwebs will trash your domain and IP reputation because they use the Junk button as the Delete button. Why does this matter? Please, let me invite you in to this rabbit hole. What I say here is based on information my best friend, who is an engineer working on email transport for a national ISP. And let me tell you, blacklists like Spamhaus, SORBS, etc. and code like SpamAssassin are the Tonka toys of spam filtering. 1. The storage for their mail system is close to 1PB of usable storage via RAID 60 storage modules in their SAN. It's a lot of drives. A lot of Enterprise-class, high RPM, expensive drives. 2. The SAN stores about 3% of all email they receive. This is not because their users are all about Inbox Zero. No, this is because they route ~97% of their received email straight into the bit bucket. Because it is clearly SPAM. Think about that 1PB of storage being multiplied to 33PB just because SPAMmers want to send email. Think about even larger ISP/ESPs that operate at much larger scale and face 97% influx of utter crap. 3. Keeping up with the constantly-evolving threat models used by SPAMmers is too much for just about any engineering team that wants to get some real work done, so they outsource the filtering. These are companies like CloudMark and Symantec to name a couple. They provide APIs where you send an email, and they return an extensive SPAMminess profile for that message. They are the Caterpillar 797F's of SPAM filtering. These companies are used by numerous other companies, so SPAM reported at one customer site aids detection at all customer sites. BTW, they have no page to log in where you can request removal from their blacklist. 4. Since false positives on classifying mail as Junk (the Junk that actually gets to the Junk box) is a huge drain on support resources, they decided to employ two such companies from the Email Filtering Industry. This is because they get different profiles from each company. They glued the two results together in multivariate tests until they found the right formula to significantly reduce the "SPAM False Positive" type of support inquiry. 5. When someone hits the Junk button in their webmail client, the ISP reports that email to both of their Email Filtering partners. These filtering companies can extrapolate the volume of email your domain sends because they see those emails as they are received by their customers. They can also track how many times a user reports it as SPAM. A few SPAM reports won't hurt your domain/IP reputation, but once you hit a certain threshold, you're blacklisted across all their customers. So what Mailgun or SendGrid can do for a customer in this ecosphere is use their relationships with the CloudMarks and Symantecs of the world. And gain some forbearance to to de-blacklist customers who are sending legit email, or who suffered an incident and were exploited by SPAMmers. I've witnessed this happening on the ConvertKit Facebook group multiple times. A marketer posts that suddenly their emails aren't reaching their canary accounts, say at Gmail. CK support gets in and says they'll contact their email provider. A day later, problem resolved and said marketer reports their mails being delivered again. So where does Junkie McJunkbutton come in to all of this? Well, they are usually non-hostile people who don't understand the implications of hitting the Junk Button. That they are essentially reporting a bad faith email event to the "Equifaxes of the email world" about you. PS Junkie McJunkbutton + going it alone for email transport is what will kill PopcornNotify and similar solutions.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ollerac 9y ago

Although I truly think this is a fantastic product, both in the simplicity of the offering and the simplicity of the API, I was a little concerned about being able to use my own domain and phone number when sending messages, for the sake of building trust with my users. Also, I (selfishly, perhaps) have more faith in the reliability of an established service than something recently launched. For anyone who has similar concerns and wants to use something more customizable and reliable like Mailgun/Twilio, but wants access to the same elegant API showcased here, you can use something like this (admittedly naive) implementation: const mailgun = require('mailgun-js')({apiKey: api_key, domain: domain}); const twilio = new require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken); export default function notify (to, msg, options) { if (Array.isArray(to)) { to.forEach((toSingle) => notify(toSingle, msg, options)); return; } if (to.includes("@")) { mailgun.messages().send({ from: 'Your name <yourname@example.com>', // your email to: to, subject: options && options.subject, text: msg }); } else { twilioClient.messages.create({ body: msg, to: to, from: '+5555555555' // your number }); } } This implementation wouldn't require that much extra effort to set up initially (i.e. signing up for two API credentials instead of one and installing two packages instead of one), but it gives you a lot more flexibility to configure the from address and phone number and might help you sleep easier at night. However, as a fellow startup founder, I think it's noble to support newer projects like this. As such, I've signed up for an account and plan to test it out for at least a month.

kevsim 9y ago
> Also, I (selfishly, perhaps) have more faith in the reliability of an established service than something recently launched. This was my thought as well. I've had a number of projects where I had to deliver large numbers of emails and SMS and the problem has never been the design of the API I used to send them. It's always about the delivery rates of those messages. Particularly with SMS we've had to be very careful with our providers, often needing to select a different one in different countries.
igammarays 9y ago
Yeah, you are probably not the target market for this lovely hobby project. Email service reliability matters, and is a very difficult problem at scale. This is why my team has been working on a production-ready, enterprise version of a unified email API for about a year now, that's free for up to 100k messages/month, and has functionality that you couldn't easily build yourself, like auto-failover over multiple providers, full-text elasticsearch of your email history/logs, and a non-technical interface for your customer support team to easily view your recipients email history. Send me a tweet @flutemail if you're interested, I'll let you know when it's ready (should be in about a month).

needcaffeine 9y ago

Great product! FYI that your terms page is broken: https://popcornnotify.com/terms https://popcornnotify.com/terms

skrebbel 9y ago

I think this is a nice idea, but I'm worried about the, let's be honest, needless single point of failure this adds to my architecture. Nothing this does ought to be more than a 100 line open source project (which is not criticism btw - if you can monetize a tiny codebase, more power to you!). But because it's SaaS, you need to depend on someone else to keep their service up and running. Because of that simple reason, I'd only use this for optional stuff, but I struggle to think of a use case where notifications are optional. ps. that said, this is a very attractive service to send SMS to Europe. I know of no service that undercuts $0.10 per SMS to European countries unless you buy in huge bulks.

vortico 9y ago
You could implement your own so that at least you're in control of your single point of failure.
mgkimsal 9y ago
> I know of no service that undercuts $0.10 per SMS to European countries unless you buy in huge bulks. Twilio looks to be under $0.10 for more than a few european countries I checked: https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/ch https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/ch https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/de https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/de https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/es https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/es https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/se https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/se https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/fi https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/fi https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/nl https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/nl
- skrebbel 9y ago
  Oh wow! Things got cheaper since last I checked, thanks!
  - mgkimsal 9y ago
    Cool. I've noticed a couple of price drops in the last couple of years, although I don't do any european SMS right now, it's good to know. Looks like plivo has some good rates too: https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ES/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ES/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FR/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FR/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FI/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FI/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/SE/#!sms https://www.plivo.com/pricing/SE/#!sms The monthly cost of a number with plivo seems a bit higher, overall, but also looks like they have free incoming SMS, which may end up being a much better deal for some use cases.

nautical 9y ago

Hi FriedPickles, Great product first of all, liked the simplicity of the product, I am also working on somewhat similar product, https://ingwe.io https://ingwe.io . I am planning to launch on hn in couple of days, best of luck :)

piyushgururani 9y ago
Nice, liked the fact that I can use API responses in templates. Will check it out too.
Akhilma93 9y ago
Is this available to use right now? Would like to have a demo
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nautical 9y ago
  Yes, please go ahead signup, its free for starting couple of days. Ping me on help anytime.

kMitnick18 9y ago

Which countries supports sending SMS?

nicky0 9y ago

I can't find information on which countries text messages can be delivered to.

thomasdd 9y ago

Found v=spf1 record for email.popcornnotify.com: v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net ~all

melq 9y ago
To those less familiar with email standards.. this means the 3rd party service send grid are the ones actually sending mail on their behalf. More specifically, SPF exists for a domain owner (in this case, popcornnotify.com) to specify who is authorized to send mail on behalf of the host email.popcornnotify.com. This is set in a DNS record and used by spam filters to prevent spoofing and such.

borplk 9y ago

FYI link to Twilio is broken.

vortico 9y ago

Seems to be a quarter of the price of https://textbelt.com/ https://textbelt.com/

matchilling 9y ago

Really like the simplicity of the project, well executed ! Good luck with it and I hope that you will resist any feature requests which will turn the product into another Mailgun/ Twilio etc. There is an audience for every (useful) product!

davidcamel 9y ago

I love how simple this is, but does it support including email attachments? I couldn't determine that based on the content of the website. EDIT: similarly, does it support MMS in addition to SMS?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

mlrtime 9y ago

Why not just amazon sns to send sms? A few lines of boto code and you're running.