6 ms·

Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day

198 points by robert_mygengo 16y ago

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
swombat 16y ago
I'm not convinced about the need for SendGrid. Learning to set up an email server isn't that hard in this day and age, and we seem to get very decent deliverability with our own SMTP server - and don't pay a penny for any emails sent. I'm planning to build an email subscription feature for swombat.com soon, and was looking at options like SendGrid, but I just can't justify the cost. When you send people a sign-up confirmation email, they expect it right now. If it's not there in a couple of minutes, in my experience, even the least tech-savvy have learned that they need to check their spam folder.
- fookyong 16y ago
  you get decent deliverability now - what are you going to do once that stops happening? one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that, so you can concentrate on your core competency.
  - moe 16y ago
    one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that Where are you getting that from? I see nothing on the SendGrid page to suggest they track your blacklist status or feel obliged to help with unlisting when it happens.
    - c3 16y ago
      We use Postmark, (we've sent a few million emails through them) and they indeed do this for us.
    - fookyong 16y ago
      http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html
- robert_mygengo 16y ago
  I don't think you're wrong — I just think that for $80, we get a lot of peace of mind once we were sending thousands of mails per day. Particularly because we're sending job notifications to translators too — so if they don't see them, they might not think to check spam.
- arn 16y ago
  Not sure how many emails you send a day, but I signed up for sendgrid almost immediately after I learned it existed. ISPs have lots of arbitrary policies. For periods of time my emails have been blocked from AOL and AT&T accounts, which make for a lot of headaches and support emails to deal with. (I'm just sending out forum registration, activation and thread subscription emails. no mass mailings.) For a while, we just told people to use non-AOL addresses. Also, I haven't noticed a delay in email deliverability. It seems to deliver quickly. Edit: If it matters, for reference, my forum sends out 6000-7000 emails a day.
- simonw 16y ago
  I was talking to the guys from mailgun.net recently, which provides a similar service to SendGrid, but also makes it easy to receive e-mail via webhooks. They told me a ton of interesting things about how this stuff actually works. Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated. You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs (E-mail Service Providers). To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly. You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up, you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam... and even after all that, you probably need to set up a relationship with AOL/Gmail/Yahoo etc to make sure your stuff gets through. You also need to watch for their bounce / rate limit notifications and dial back your sending rates to match. There's a whole lot more to it than just setting up an SMTP server.
  - swombat 16y ago
    All of this apart from the relationships with ESPs is relatively easy to do if you're a competent sysadmin. As far as the ESPs are concerned, all of them appear to accept our emails just fine, except for Hotmail. We've largely given up on Hotmail, but then everyone who uses hotmail seems to be aware that it marks everything as spam and so they check their spam box as often as their inbox, from the looks of it. It's a nice convincing argument. It just hasn't borne out in practice for us. Email is critical to us, and it gets delivered just fine the vast majority of the time. We've had about 2 cases in 3 years where we needed to intervene manually to talk to some kind of ESP to get us unblocked, because they'd randomly decided to blacklist our IP. That's not worth $80/m.
    - mike-cardwell 16y ago
      The trouble with hotmail is they sometimes just blackhole what they classify to be spam, instead of filtering it into the Junk folder. It doesn't even bounce, it just disappears.
      - idlewords 16y ago
- patio11 16y ago
  I use SendGrid, too. It was a no-brainer: $80 a month is cheap, I am expensive. I was quite expensive indeed dealing with persistent minor clusterflops like, e.g., automated forum spambots for the forum I host for college debaters (an old hobby) caused the BCC mailserver they were freeloading off of to have enough of a spike that a large multinational advertising company decided BCC "Thanks for paying me $30 Cindy, here's the software you just bought" emails needed to be consigned to the seventh circle of hell sandwiched between Viagra spam and their own customer support requests.
- relix 16y ago
  I dropped the idea of using Postmark after I read this blog-post: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmail-delivery-adaptive-filters http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmai... In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.
- rlivsey 16y ago
  For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing. In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well. We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch! [1] - http://spreedly.com/ [2] - http://postmarkapp.com
- smhinsey 16y ago
  My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.
- robgwin 16y ago
  This isn't a technical question, it's an economics question. If you would rather put in effort than dollars, then do it yourself, and it will work great for a while. But if your business takes off, you will accumulate email-related problems like bacteria, and suddenly that $20/month starts to sound reeal worth it.
fookyong 16y ago
I use a few in that list too, but in particular SendGrid and DropBox have really been life-savers (paid user of both). They both solve a problem that is otherwise quite complicated and boring to solve, in a very simple, hassle-free way.
insight 16y ago
As usual, the only people who make money on the gold rush are the shovel sellers
- robert_mygengo 16y ago
  LOL. I guess we make shovels too though. So no biggie.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ladon86 16y ago
Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.
- Klonoar 16y ago
  Postmark App (http://postmarkapp.com http://postmarkapp.com) has worked well for me in terms of sending large quantities of emails in the past. Easy integration, good team, active development.
  - ollie 16y ago
    I've just started integrating postmark on an app I'm working on; their API & docs are excellent, they're not too pricy either.
  - rodh257 16y ago
    I've just used PostMarkApp on a site, I love their interface, all works great but they only allow 'transactional' emails, which I guess is like 'click here to activate your account', whereas my site was sending out alerts to people (kind of like facebook does, but not as often), which they didn't seem to like too much. Does sendgrid allow this? I've signed up to SocketLabs which seems to do it but haven't been able to get SMTP sending working correctly yet, haven't spent much time on it though. For the record, the amount of hassles I've had with SMTP servers these services are very handy, especially for logs etc like postmark has
    - Rob1979 16y ago
      In our usage, Sendgrid never complained. No particular knowledge about specific usages.
    - malcolmong 16y ago
      wait, what do you mean Postmark doesn't allow sending "alert" (notification) emails? Can you elaborate?
- joshfraser 16y ago
arn 16y ago
I'll add to the list my favorite service I don't ever hear talked about. SpamStopsHere: http://www.greenviewdata.com/spamstopshere/index.php http://www.greenviewdata.com/spamstopshere/index.php The killer feature for me is a very low false positive rate. Very few legitimate emails get blocked, based on the way they are filtered.
joshfraser 16y ago
The two I love most on this list are SendGrid and Dropbox. Both solve a real pain point in a simple way.
aymeric 16y ago
Blog is down... "Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; No Preferences Found"
- robert_mygengo 16y ago
  Should be OK now. 600 concurrent users is big for us.
robert_mygengo 16y ago
Seems like SendGrid caused the vast majority of comments so far. I feel like Xero, Apigee and RightSignature should get more love. What do you guys think?
petenixey 16y ago
I'll second that Xero is an excellent service and it really doesn't get as much press as it deserves in the states. They're very easy to use and have done an heroic job building out both the software and support. HOWEVER, their entry-pricing is incredibly irritating. For $228/year you can't add any more than 5 invoices or reconcile more than 20 lines of bank statement per month. For the entire price of quickbooks every single year you should be able to at least use your accounting system.
- pwim 16y ago
  But for only $29/month you can. How much is your time worth? If the service saves you even an hour per month, surely it is worth it.
  - coderdude 16y ago
    >How much is your time worth? I hate this argument. It's so narrowly focused (and for some reason, often regurgitated). Money adds up a lot quicker than that one hour of your time. If you save yourself 10 hours of work per month because of a couple services you pay for, but end up spending an extra $300/month while your startup isn't making any money -- is that actually smart time/money management? There are more factors involved than simply how you value your time. The stage your business is in, how much money you're pulling in, how many other things you need to get done per day, is your startup bootstrapped, do you still have a day job, etc.
    - mromaine 16y ago
      two words - "opportunity cost".
      - coderdude 16y ago
        Why do you think that opportunity cost is specifically applicable to this situation? If it's "just in general" then I don't believe that opportunity cost is a good argument for continuing the meme of "How much is your time worth?" in these kinds of discussions. If it is applicable, it would have to be on a case-by-case basis to even make sense, no?
megablast 16y ago
Wow, having used EE, I always thought it was cumbersome to use, prone to running out of memory very easy, and did not offer much over regular php or Drupal/Joomla.
Schmelson 16y ago
Yeah, office Glico is the besssssttt!
- robert_mygengo 16y ago
  Finally, some love for the Gleec.
mono 16y ago
Wow. Looks like you have outsourced every imaginable job when there's a webservice for it. Are you doing this because of bad experiences when servicing your own or did you do this from the start? Did you compare the running costs/reliability between outsourcing and self administration with a positive result into outsourcing?
- robert_mygengo 16y ago
  Interesting. I think most of this stuff is not a core competency for a startup. I guess my responses are: 1. Zendesk We needed a good system, not really outsourcing of support. So, we do our support in-house but we use the Zendesk SaaS system to manage it. 2. GetSatisfaction As above. 3. SendGrid Email deliverability was not a piece of expertise we had in-house, especially when we were 2-3 people. Now we're 10-ish, our sysadmin guys STILL don't want to do this stuff. 4. MailChimp Hand-coding HTML emails more than once was boring. 5. Apigee This is something we were on the fence about. The metrics visualization probably swung it. 6. String No-brainer :) 7. ExpressionEngine Still a bit of friction in the decision between self-coding or using EE. But it's the 'annoying' stuff that swings it like plugin availability for new functionality, rather than do-it-yourself. 8. Chartbeat Couldn't do this ourselves. 9. Mint Could do this ourselves, too cheap to bother. 10. PivotalTracker As above. 11. Salesforce Industry standard, makes sense to outsiders, reliable. 12. RightSignature Awesome. No point building ourselves. Legal worries too if we did. 13. Gotomeeting Yeah no way we want to build this. 14. Xero The non-enterprise stuff we do is billed through our own app. But Xero makes sense for invoicing and proper accounts. Risk is, if you build it yourself, you need to know GAAP inside-and-out AND still it's a concern for outside auditors I think. 15. Dropbox Yeah no way. BONUS: Office Glico Well, we could get an intern to go to the mom&pop store every week. But no.
  - mono 16y ago
    Thanks for this long version! Might learn to stop trying to maintain every solution on myself.
sad_hacker 16y ago
I recommend Piwik for real-time statistics alternative to Google Analytics. It's free also.
cplamper 16y ago
I like getsatisfaction. It makes it really easy to aggregate user voices about your product. I also use Mailchimp for a couple of clients - highly recommended.
GBond 16y ago
>Salesforce is basically just a very flexible database with hundreds of custom fields, i.e. to a programmer it seems like a $25/user version of phpmyadmin... but it’s money well spent. That is the most underwhelming endorsement of salesforce.com I've ever seen.
jread 16y ago
+1 for apigee - we just migrated our web services and the stats, graphing and real-time debugger are excellent. Migration was super easy.
- bengl3rt 16y ago
  This looks really cool. I'm glad I found it!
dickeytk 16y ago
I prefer uservoice to getsatisfaction, it doesn't have as many features, but it's easier to use. I think that's more important for a social support tool
dylanz 16y ago
We use RightSignature to handle the signing of all internal/external documents. I'm biased, but I think it's the best SaaS document signing application available :)

198 points by robert_mygengo 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

I'm not convinced about the need for SendGrid. Learning to set up an email server isn't that hard in this day and age, and we seem to get very decent deliverability with our own SMTP server - and don't pay a penny for any emails sent. I'm planning to build an email subscription feature for swombat.com soon, and was looking at options like SendGrid, but I just can't justify the cost. When you send people a sign-up confirmation email, they expect it right now. If it's not there in a couple of minutes, in my experience, even the least tech-savvy have learned that they need to check their spam folder.

fookyong 16y ago
you get decent deliverability now - what are you going to do once that stops happening? one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that, so you can concentrate on your core competency.
- moe 16y ago
  one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that Where are you getting that from? I see nothing on the SendGrid page to suggest they track your blacklist status or feel obliged to help with unlisting when it happens.
  - c3 16y ago
    We use Postmark, (we've sent a few million emails through them) and they indeed do this for us.
  - fookyong 16y ago
    http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html http://sendgrid.com/deliverability.html
robert_mygengo 16y ago
I don't think you're wrong — I just think that for $80, we get a lot of peace of mind once we were sending thousands of mails per day. Particularly because we're sending job notifications to translators too — so if they don't see them, they might not think to check spam.
arn 16y ago
Not sure how many emails you send a day, but I signed up for sendgrid almost immediately after I learned it existed. ISPs have lots of arbitrary policies. For periods of time my emails have been blocked from AOL and AT&T accounts, which make for a lot of headaches and support emails to deal with. (I'm just sending out forum registration, activation and thread subscription emails. no mass mailings.) For a while, we just told people to use non-AOL addresses. Also, I haven't noticed a delay in email deliverability. It seems to deliver quickly. Edit: If it matters, for reference, my forum sends out 6000-7000 emails a day.
simonw 16y ago
I was talking to the guys from mailgun.net recently, which provides a similar service to SendGrid, but also makes it easy to receive e-mail via webhooks. They told me a ton of interesting things about how this stuff actually works. Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated. You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be whitelisted by the big ESPs (E-mail Service Providers). To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it properly. You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up, you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously been used for spam... and even after all that, you probably need to set up a relationship with AOL/Gmail/Yahoo etc to make sure your stuff gets through. You also need to watch for their bounce / rate limit notifications and dial back your sending rates to match. There's a whole lot more to it than just setting up an SMTP server.
- swombat 16y ago
  All of this apart from the relationships with ESPs is relatively easy to do if you're a competent sysadmin. As far as the ESPs are concerned, all of them appear to accept our emails just fine, except for Hotmail. We've largely given up on Hotmail, but then everyone who uses hotmail seems to be aware that it marks everything as spam and so they check their spam box as often as their inbox, from the looks of it. It's a nice convincing argument. It just hasn't borne out in practice for us. Email is critical to us, and it gets delivered just fine the vast majority of the time. We've had about 2 cases in 3 years where we needed to intervene manually to talk to some kind of ESP to get us unblocked, because they'd randomly decided to blacklist our IP. That's not worth $80/m.
  - mike-cardwell 16y ago
    The trouble with hotmail is they sometimes just blackhole what they classify to be spam, instead of filtering it into the Junk folder. It doesn't even bounce, it just disappears.
    - idlewords 16y ago
patio11 16y ago
I use SendGrid, too. It was a no-brainer: $80 a month is cheap, I am expensive. I was quite expensive indeed dealing with persistent minor clusterflops like, e.g., automated forum spambots for the forum I host for college debaters (an old hobby) caused the BCC mailserver they were freeloading off of to have enough of a spike that a large multinational advertising company decided BCC "Thanks for paying me $30 Cindy, here's the software you just bought" emails needed to be consigned to the seventh circle of hell sandwiched between Viagra spam and their own customer support requests.
relix 16y ago
I dropped the idea of using Postmark after I read this blog-post: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmail-delivery-adaptive-filters http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/1431120311/oddities-in-gmai... In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.
rlivsey 16y ago
For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing. In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well. We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch! [1] - http://spreedly.com/ [2] - http://postmarkapp.com
smhinsey 16y ago
My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.
robgwin 16y ago
This isn't a technical question, it's an economics question. If you would rather put in effort than dollars, then do it yourself, and it will work great for a while. But if your business takes off, you will accumulate email-related problems like bacteria, and suddenly that $20/month starts to sound reeal worth it.

fookyong 16y ago

I use a few in that list too, but in particular SendGrid and DropBox have really been life-savers (paid user of both). They both solve a problem that is otherwise quite complicated and boring to solve, in a very simple, hassle-free way.

insight 16y ago

As usual, the only people who make money on the gold rush are the shovel sellers

robert_mygengo 16y ago
LOL. I guess we make shovels too though. So no biggie.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

ladon86 16y ago

Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.

Klonoar 16y ago
Postmark App (http://postmarkapp.com http://postmarkapp.com) has worked well for me in terms of sending large quantities of emails in the past. Easy integration, good team, active development.
- ollie 16y ago
  I've just started integrating postmark on an app I'm working on; their API & docs are excellent, they're not too pricy either.
- rodh257 16y ago
  I've just used PostMarkApp on a site, I love their interface, all works great but they only allow 'transactional' emails, which I guess is like 'click here to activate your account', whereas my site was sending out alerts to people (kind of like facebook does, but not as often), which they didn't seem to like too much. Does sendgrid allow this? I've signed up to SocketLabs which seems to do it but haven't been able to get SMTP sending working correctly yet, haven't spent much time on it though. For the record, the amount of hassles I've had with SMTP servers these services are very handy, especially for logs etc like postmark has
  - Rob1979 16y ago
    In our usage, Sendgrid never complained. No particular knowledge about specific usages.
  - malcolmong 16y ago
    wait, what do you mean Postmark doesn't allow sending "alert" (notification) emails? Can you elaborate?
joshfraser 16y ago

arn 16y ago

I'll add to the list my favorite service I don't ever hear talked about. SpamStopsHere: http://www.greenviewdata.com/spamstopshere/index.php http://www.greenviewdata.com/spamstopshere/index.php The killer feature for me is a very low false positive rate. Very few legitimate emails get blocked, based on the way they are filtered.

joshfraser 16y ago

The two I love most on this list are SendGrid and Dropbox. Both solve a real pain point in a simple way.

aymeric 16y ago

Blog is down... "Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; No Preferences Found"

robert_mygengo 16y ago
Should be OK now. 600 concurrent users is big for us.

robert_mygengo 16y ago

Seems like SendGrid caused the vast majority of comments so far. I feel like Xero, Apigee and RightSignature should get more love. What do you guys think?

petenixey 16y ago

I'll second that Xero is an excellent service and it really doesn't get as much press as it deserves in the states. They're very easy to use and have done an heroic job building out both the software and support. HOWEVER, their entry-pricing is incredibly irritating. For $228/year you can't add any more than 5 invoices or reconcile more than 20 lines of bank statement per month. For the entire price of quickbooks every single year you should be able to at least use your accounting system.

pwim 16y ago
But for only $29/month you can. How much is your time worth? If the service saves you even an hour per month, surely it is worth it.
- coderdude 16y ago
  >How much is your time worth? I hate this argument. It's so narrowly focused (and for some reason, often regurgitated). Money adds up a lot quicker than that one hour of your time. If you save yourself 10 hours of work per month because of a couple services you pay for, but end up spending an extra $300/month while your startup isn't making any money -- is that actually smart time/money management? There are more factors involved than simply how you value your time. The stage your business is in, how much money you're pulling in, how many other things you need to get done per day, is your startup bootstrapped, do you still have a day job, etc.
  - mromaine 16y ago
    two words - "opportunity cost".
    - coderdude 16y ago
      Why do you think that opportunity cost is specifically applicable to this situation? If it's "just in general" then I don't believe that opportunity cost is a good argument for continuing the meme of "How much is your time worth?" in these kinds of discussions. If it is applicable, it would have to be on a case-by-case basis to even make sense, no?

megablast 16y ago

Wow, having used EE, I always thought it was cumbersome to use, prone to running out of memory very easy, and did not offer much over regular php or Drupal/Joomla.

Schmelson 16y ago

Yeah, office Glico is the besssssttt!

robert_mygengo 16y ago
Finally, some love for the Gleec.

mono 16y ago

Wow. Looks like you have outsourced every imaginable job when there's a webservice for it. Are you doing this because of bad experiences when servicing your own or did you do this from the start? Did you compare the running costs/reliability between outsourcing and self administration with a positive result into outsourcing?

robert_mygengo 16y ago
Interesting. I think most of this stuff is not a core competency for a startup. I guess my responses are: 1. Zendesk We needed a good system, not really outsourcing of support. So, we do our support in-house but we use the Zendesk SaaS system to manage it. 2. GetSatisfaction As above. 3. SendGrid Email deliverability was not a piece of expertise we had in-house, especially when we were 2-3 people. Now we're 10-ish, our sysadmin guys STILL don't want to do this stuff. 4. MailChimp Hand-coding HTML emails more than once was boring. 5. Apigee This is something we were on the fence about. The metrics visualization probably swung it. 6. String No-brainer :) 7. ExpressionEngine Still a bit of friction in the decision between self-coding or using EE. But it's the 'annoying' stuff that swings it like plugin availability for new functionality, rather than do-it-yourself. 8. Chartbeat Couldn't do this ourselves. 9. Mint Could do this ourselves, too cheap to bother. 10. PivotalTracker As above. 11. Salesforce Industry standard, makes sense to outsiders, reliable. 12. RightSignature Awesome. No point building ourselves. Legal worries too if we did. 13. Gotomeeting Yeah no way we want to build this. 14. Xero The non-enterprise stuff we do is billed through our own app. But Xero makes sense for invoicing and proper accounts. Risk is, if you build it yourself, you need to know GAAP inside-and-out AND still it's a concern for outside auditors I think. 15. Dropbox Yeah no way. BONUS: Office Glico Well, we could get an intern to go to the mom&pop store every week. But no.
- mono 16y ago
  Thanks for this long version! Might learn to stop trying to maintain every solution on myself.

sad_hacker 16y ago

I recommend Piwik for real-time statistics alternative to Google Analytics. It's free also.

cplamper 16y ago

I like getsatisfaction. It makes it really easy to aggregate user voices about your product. I also use Mailchimp for a couple of clients - highly recommended.

GBond 16y ago

>Salesforce is basically just a very flexible database with hundreds of custom fields, i.e. to a programmer it seems like a $25/user version of phpmyadmin... but it’s money well spent. That is the most underwhelming endorsement of salesforce.com I've ever seen.

jread 16y ago

+1 for apigee - we just migrated our web services and the stats, graphing and real-time debugger are excellent. Migration was super easy.

bengl3rt 16y ago
This looks really cool. I'm glad I found it!

dickeytk 16y ago

I prefer uservoice to getsatisfaction, it doesn't have as many features, but it's easier to use. I think that's more important for a social support tool

dylanz 16y ago

We use RightSignature to handle the signing of all internal/external documents. I'm biased, but I think it's the best SaaS document signing application available :)