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When I looked into Amazingmail, it cost $2K for an API key. Is this still the case?

• gfodor 13y ago
  Yeah, it's not really for an "API key" though, that oversimplifies things. You are paying for support in setting up your account. For something like printing it takes a few iterations to make sure things are set up properly and you are producing the proper assets for them to print (colors, margins, etc.) This isn't a turnkey thing like Stripe or other APIs, there are a number of practical issues that you need to address when designing something for automated printing. When I set up my account with them they caught a number of issues with my template before I started printing, and then verified physical prints looked acceptable before mailing me some test prints. This support is what you are paying for. A self-service REST interface like this, for non-trivial jobs, is going to either require the same level of setup/support, which is a cost they are swallowing somehow but won't be sustainable in the long run, or will require you to do a large number of test-runs to get things right before going live, with each test-run taking about a week before you have the physical result in your hands. And even then, there may be issues that you are unaware of, such as cropping, clipping, or color bleeding, that may occur only a small percentage of the time based upon their specific process if you did not design things properly. There's no free lunch.