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Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push
- braindumps 8y agoThis is neat but I wonder if companies would just build this themselves instead?
- sshmania 8y agoWe built some of this functionality internally 6mos ago. Wish I had seen this then...
- oferzelig 8y agoSo ship it as a product. Offer competition.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoThey might do, but they also might opt not to if this solution exists? Or they just don't build it and approve things not via an API. There may be a lot of processes out there that could benefit from something like this.
- sshmania 8y agoInteresting that you can use this for two-man rule...especially since this api is real-time. I'm having trouble thinking of scenario where I would use this feature at my company, but cool nonetheless
- thedangler 8y agotwo man rule?
- sshmania 8y agoOn the site it's called multi-person approvals, but this is the other name for it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule
- filoleg 8y agoYou just have to think of it as a sign-off rather than an approval, and you can quickly come up with many use cases for it. For example, imagine that you are responsible for rolling the build this week, and you need to get a sign off from an assigned person on each sister team, confirming that they tested their feature area before you push the trigger and roll the build. You can either email and try to contact each person individually, but the cleanest way to solve this issue would be to create a multi-person approval, where you can track the status of a sign off for each sister team in real time. Approval serves as an affirmation in this scenario.
- chaosprophet 8y agoWow, $1 for 100 emails is very very very very expensive. So expensive that I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money. It's a pretty solid idea otherwise.
- flatearther43 8y agoNot sure if I agree, but what do you think would be a fair price for something like this?
- mrbbk 8y agoCurious how you calculated that -- mind sharing back of the napkin?
- krsdcbl 8y agoFelt the same, though it really depends very much on your use case. If you end up in the thousands of daily approvals, then yes, that would be immensly expensive for the service it provides
- davedx 8y ago> I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations. I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a million emails to break even. How many of this kind of transactional email do you send per year?
- nickphx 8y agoHow do you prevent email/web filtering applications that "scan" email/web URLs from triggering the confirmation/denials?
- jteppinette 8y agoThe OpenAPI link is returning a 404. https://approveapi.com/docs/open-api-spec-2.0.json https://approveapi.com/docs/open-api-spec-2.0.json
- agrinman 8y agoOops that's an outdated link, will fix asap. In the mean-time here is the spec: https://github.com/approveapi/openapi-spec https://github.com/approveapi/openapi-spec
- jteppinette 8y agoA useful feature for a service like this is being able to set delegates both from the producer and consumer side. For example, if the person I sent the notification to doesn’t respond in <time window>, then send a request to this person (potentially their manager / emergency contact / etc...) . And, as someone receiving notifications, set another person as my delegate for a certain time window and for a specific application. This is what we have to deal with to handle OOO scenarios.
- IanCal 8y agoLooks good, quick testing seems to suggest it works pretty smoothly. Small point, I'm not in the US so it'd be good to see the international SMS prices. There's no link I could see on the main page and the one after signing in doesn't resolve: https://dashboard.approveapi.com/full-sms-pricing https://dashboard.approveapi.com/full-sms-pricing edit - With customisation, can I put in links? Pictures?
- agrinman 8y agoThanks! Oops, fixing the link now. We simply just pass along our at-cost price for sending an SMS via Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/us https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/us. Re: customization, we're quickly adding more customizations like colors/images, etc. Currently you can add a logo for your company, and customize all the text on the approval (approve text/reject text/title/body/etc). You can also specify redirect on {approve, reject} links to take the user somewhere after they answer the prompt.
- IanCal 8y agoThanks! Bear in mind this is coming from a likely extremely low use user, but supporting links in the text that's sent may solve most problems other customisation would be used for when it comes to content (rather than look & feel). FWIW, my current use-case I'd like to put in here is that I've got some auto-generated art based on user inputs that I'll be shipping off. There's some stuff that could go wrong, so having a final check before the order goes in would be great. Currently the workflow would be Auto generate I check occasionally, manually set the order to go. I'd like to change it to Auto generate -> send me either the picture itself or a link to it, I hit approve/reject -> order completed automatically For ~1 cent per order, it's not worth me even getting email alerting setup.
- agrinman 8y agoYou can put links in the body of the request, most mail clients should render them without a problem
- wjossey 8y agoHit y'all up on intercom but leaving my feedback here as well. I built this out internally for my app, and it took me a little over a day to do it. Had this existed when I built it out, I absolutely would have just paid a buck per 100 emails to save myself time; however, I don't think it's a challenging enough problem on its surface to keep someone from re-writing it and replacing you long term. All that being said, it's a good foundational product, and hopefully you'll add some more features that make it sticky / become aggressive on pricing at scale. Best of luck!
- everdev 8y ago> I don't think it's a challenging enough problem on its surface to keep someone from re-writing it and replacing you long term Agreed, it's nice to get something up and running for a personal project, but I'm building a commercial app that has to pass a basic security audit and every 3rd party service adds another attack vector and potential leak of sensitive data (like name, Email & phone). I love the idea of being able to run a service like this though that's basically a set and forget hackathon project.
- sanjeevkm 8y agoSmall Suggestion In the `POST /prompt` endpoint provide a way to pass metadata that does not need to be shown to the user, and return that back in the prompt answer object sent in the webhook/callback. This is helpful in cases, where I want to send some internal transaction or event reference codes that will help me to properly co-relate the answer into my flow. Best of luck!
- 4kevinking 8y agoThanks for the suggestion! This is on our product roadmap. One way to track users is also to specify approve/reject redirect urls with random tokens (though we agree that private metadata is more ergonomic in this case).
- RossDM 8y agoI like the API documentation formatting; how was this created?
- lfx 8y agoLooks cool! Can this be used for phone number verification? If so how this would work? The user would get a text with a link? Or shortcode?
- agrinman 8y agoYes! The user would get a text with a link.
- mjortberg521 8y agoThe email in the video on the site looks too much like a phishing attempt to me.
- 4kevinking 8y agoThat's a mocked-up css animation, not a video of the actual email. Feel free to try the demo in the API dashboard to see the full UX.
- dosy 8y agoI wish I built this. this is a great idea. it's simple and useful it's something I could have built myself in a couple of weeks and it aggregates a lot of business useful functionality into one place. I'm putting this in my list of businesses that are good ideas because they factor out internal projects repeated across many companies. Reading the comments here it seems a lot of people are triggered. instead of acknowledging the idea is good and they wish they had build at themselves, they are in denial dismissing it's utility by saying it won't work as a business, or they could build it internally. I say this in the Spirit of a good hn comment is something we can learn from and I believe people can learn from examining their own reactions. it seems the denial and dismissal simply serves to make one feel better about the realisation that they missed the chance to build this even though they could have and it is a good idea. so instead of facing that feeling and learning something useful they "alter reality" by downplaying the idea is good to limit the pain. my point is that that's not a very useful response because it neutralizes the opportunity that could be something to learn from. and I guess if you do this pattern of behaviour enough then, you stop yourself learning many times miss the chance to create things you want and maybe get addicted to this reaction of altering reality to feel better rather than learning something to get a result.
- wjossey 8y agoI appreciate your defense of these folks. It’s a kind gesture with great intent behind it. My response in no way takes away from the spirit of your post. I think the core of why people are responding how they are is that there’s not a big moat here, yet. You mention people being triggered due to missing out on their opportunity to build it- but in reality someone can just knock these folks off after a couple of weekends. That’s not to say the tech here shouldn’t exist, or that this isn’t a business. It is, I’d pay for it, I just wouldn’t pay for long. That’s ok though, it’s just a specific type of business. I hope they stumble across something sticky in their solution that makes them painful to replicate. These sorts of utilities are always welcome and they make bootstrapping faster and faster every year.
- timvdalen 8y agoReally cool! Some small feedback: * The code in the "Test it in the Console" section is missing \'s, so you can't actually copy paste it as is now. * The demo on the homepage suggests that there's some magic dynamic stuff happening in the email, which makes the actual email a bit of a letdown (though this is understandable)
- 4kevinking 8y agoThanks for the feedback! You can copy an escaped version by clicking the icon in the upper-right.
- lapnitnelav 8y ago"ApproveAPI uses HTTP Basic Authentication where the username is your API key and the password is blank." I'm not too fond of the lack of API password tbh. Cool idea otherwise.
- hipjiveguy 8y agoI think it looks good but needs examples of something other than just "yes/no" dialogs, or maybe all use cases are boiled down to that? If not, you should include detailed examples for "Send magic sign-in links, two-step verification, re-authenticate long-lived sessions, new device confirmations, verify identity for lost accounts or customer support."