
Show HN: Your Twitter mentions and DMs in an email on a schedule that suits you - benhowdle
https://disconnect.today/
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bangda
I like the idea but i think you can do better with a different revenue model.
I think you should go for a yearly subscription model. That way users can pay
a very small amount yearly and if you hang in there for very long, you will be
in benefit .If you shut down early , users wont be pissed off.

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IanCal
I think this is a good idea. Also, I'm not sure I'm particularly sensitive to
a price difference between $5/year and $5 once. Particularly since we're
talking about a tech thing that could fade from relevance a few years from
now.

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benhowdle
Very true. I figured it was a low enough fee that if Twitter cut me off/it
became irrelevant, it's not the biggest loss for the paying user (obviously
sucks, but didn't feel it warranted yearly subscriptions)

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IanCal
I think that's fair, I just also think that the price to me feels about the
same ($5/year or $5 for some unknown number of years), and would give you some
ongoing money rather than a block at once then regular maintenance, while at
the same time limiting the runway you'd need to give people while still fully
providing them with the service they paid for / you could always refund the
last year and it wouldn't wipe out everything.

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soulchild37
Great idea! I am curious how you are able to sustain the server fees by just
charging one off fees.

My thought is that your server have to continuously check for tweets from user
timeline and send any mentions to their email everyday / 2-day/ week. There is
a daily cost for each user and it will only increase as more user uses your
service.

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benhowdle
You'd be wise to think that, but I actually use Heroku's "Scheduler" add-on,
so they just fire up a one-off dyno once a day and run my script. This script
just checks the database for the user's it needs to check (paying && valid
email) and fires off Twitter API requests for them. If there's @mentions/DMs
that fit in with the frequency the user has selected, the email is fired off
through AWS SES. Honestly, the server costs for this will be quite low for
quite some time. If it takes off big time, sure, I'll re-evaluate the pricing
model.

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onion2k
I get the idea and I can see why you might want a service like this, but
unless you're famous (for some value of 'famous') wouldn't disconnecting from
Twitter by not looking at it and not posting mean you won't get actually any
DMs or mentions any more? This service won't actually do anything after a
month or two.

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benhowdle
For sure, and the I fully appreciate the irony of me promoting this on Twitter
(if everyone used this, no-one would see my tweet). I feel like this can just
aid a certain way of using Twitter, ie. by being broadcast-only (maybe posting
from a 3rd party app), and just being selective on what you reply to (based on
the email Disconnect Today sends you).

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dantiberian
Just signed up for an account. This looks like just what I was looking for, as
I block Twitter in my hosts file, and on my iPhone with
[https://freedom.to](https://freedom.to), but I still want to know if I do get
a DM or mention.

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AJRF
I made this exact same tool during a Hackathon recently and called it
Disconnect. Life is curious.

~~~
benhowdle
What is life...

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averagewall
I want to use this but I'm afraid it circumvents Twitter's advertising and
they'll surely shut it down. I guess $5 for now until shutdown is still worth
it.

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theDoug
This page doesn't show anything, but maybe examples of what the email looks
like, or how the schedule is controlled, would.

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benhowdle
Hey, have now added a couple of screenshots on the homepage!

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r3bl
Could you add an indication of the pricing model somewhere?

It seemed to me that the service is free until I actually checked the comments
here.

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rmlewisuk
From the home page:

> A one-off $5 payment activates your account for life

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icco
Oh neat! I've been wanting to build something like this that emails me this
plus all tweets by people in a list.

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jnpatel
Nuzzle ([http://nuzzel.com/](http://nuzzel.com/)) is a great option for email
digests of articles that several of your Twitter followers have shared. I
haven't looked into how much customizability they give you over the
content/frequency of the emails though.

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eps
Why is it asking for the _write_ access to one's Twitter account?

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davidbwire
Twitter API does not currently provide a way to request read only permission
to access direct messages.

