
Show HN: EasyPost - the Stripe for postage - jstreebin
http://easypost.co
======
jontas
I've been using this for years now and love it:

<https://rocketship.it/>

It is a slightly different concept, you pay once and get code that gives you a
uniform interface for communicating with the different carriers (USPS, FedEx,
UPS, etc.).

Since it is a one time fee I didn't expect support, however, the developer has
been very responsive and helpful whenever I've run into a problem.

~~~
marcrosoft
Developer of RocketShipIt, thanks for the kind words!

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kaolinite
One of the ideas in my ideas file is a service that provides an API for
sending letters. You simply send a PDF/DOC/etc along with address information,
your API key, postage type, etc, and then the letter is printed (by myself)
and posted.

Possible uses of the service would be automatic sending of invoices or mailing
out payment reminders or contracts that need to be signed, etc.

There are a few companies that provide similar services but I haven't found
one that does it in a particularly nice way. They often require using SOAP and
don't have modules for common frameworks and SDKs for common languages.

Would any of you use this or are letters completely dead to young companies?

~~~
nulluk
International is where this could really shine, print out at the location
closest to where the letter needs delivering & avoid international prices

~~~
dagw
_avoid international prices_

For many pairs of countries the price of sending a letter from A->B is less
than sending a letter within B. In addition I imagine the labor costs of
having people stuff envelopes will a significant source of costs. So you're
probably better off picking 3-5 central points with cheap labor and cheap
postage, rather than opening dozens of small centers all around the globe

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philip1209
Intriguing. What would HN think of an API for physically printing and mailing
things? i.e., an API where you pay ~$0.50 per postcard, and it is printed and
deposited in the mail autonomously. You could use it for CRM applications,
address verification (like Google Adwords), etc

~~~
johns
<http://www.postalmethods.com/lp/postcard-api> <http://www.viapost.com/>

I know there are others too but I can't find them at the moment.

~~~
scottmotte
<http://dev.sincerely.com/> is another.

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meritt
Extremely interested in address verification. Please tell me it does
normalization/correction that is able to take fuzzy/dirty/invalid data and
yield a proper and well-formatted address into standard fields?

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avidal
This is exactly what I'm looking for. I'm really hoping I don't have to
integrate with FedEx web services for address verification. If the price is
right, my company will gladly pay for this service over the free service
provided by FedEx.

~~~
meritt
We're currently using Google's Geocoder and Yahoo's Placefinder, which work
okay, but they both have numerous flaws and various TOS policies we're
ignoring for the moment.

Would happily pay for this service as well.

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patrickod
Is anyone else experiencing DNS issues resolving api.easypost.co?

    
    
      ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @8.8.8.8 api.easypost.co A
      ; (1 server found)
      ;; global options: +cmd
      ;; Got answer:
      ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 20795
      ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
    
      ;; QUESTION SECTION:
      ;api.easypost.co.   IN  A
    
      ;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
      easypost.co.    1667  IN  SOA dns1.web-hosting.com. hosting-notifications.namecheaphosting.com. 2012091008     86400 7200 3600000 86400
    
      ;; Query time: 44 msec
      ;; SERVER: 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8)
      ;; WHEN: Tue Sep 18 09:48:17 2012
      ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 128

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jstreebin
API not up yet, sry

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thibaultj
In France, you can connect to « La Poste »'s website to send letters from the
web. Problem is this site is particularly painful to use. UX is awful, error
messages are useless, and so on.

I could totally use a simple rest api to print and send a pdf as a physical
letter

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robomartin
Do any of these services have the ability to optimize packaging of goods?

Say you sell physical goods. A customer buys multiple items. They each have
known shipping dimensions.

The question is: How do you consolidate the shipment into one or more boxes in
order to optimize for minimum shipping costs?

Keep in mind that minimum shipping costs could also include the cost of
shipping supplies as well as packaging and handling labor.

The most basic problem is fitting n packages of m[i] dimensions into the
available stock of standard boxes and pick the arrangement that provides the
least postage cost.

~~~
ajryan
You realize this is basically the same as the NP-Hard Knapsack problem?

~~~
robomartin
Right, but that wasn't the question. Having done a lot of work with genetic
algorithms, among other things, I have no doubt that I could sit down and
write a reasonably useful solution. However, it would be absolutely brilliant
if this was already part of an existing shipping API.

I think it would be very useful if these shipping API's accepted package
specifications and helped optimize final packaging while in the process of
providing a quote. If you want to talk about differentiating a solution, this,
most definitely, would.

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chao-
As someone who is just now tackling USPS integration for the first time on
behalf of a client, you certainly have my interest.

~~~
jstreebin
Cool! Exactly what I've seen with my own integration. Huge pain points here

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fuzzythinker
On signup: Maybe more wording to indicate I've signed up for beta instead of
just a check mark? Since I don't know if the check mark means I've signed up
or just the email is verified.

On "using": Slightly confusing to put it after the first drop down. It took me
a few seconds to get it, I would put "using" in between the 2 drop downs
instead.

~~~
jstreebin
Maybe just get rid of the validation altogether?

Fixed -- how's that look? put the 'using' before second drop down

~~~
jstreebin
Yeah, initially had both name and email so was using the validation. Will just
get rid of the validation altogether. thanks for the heads up!

~~~
fuzzythinker
typo on signup form: Shipping price "comparison"

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waterside81
For Canadian customers, Canada Post has _finally_ added an API to create &
print labels. My company uses Stamps.com's API to print USPS labels (I have
Django code if anyone's interested) but this would definitely have saved us
some development time.

~~~
jstreebin
Exactly, that's what I"m hearing from a lot of potentials--too much dev time
to get postage working

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nchuhoai
Would totally use this for address verification. Wonder what the pricing is.

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striglia
Love the presentation of the various API calls in each language. My only
nitpick is one I have for a lot of code displays like this -- selecting the
code also selects line numbers =)

~~~
jstreebin
Ha! I was just thinking I should get rid of those :)

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frankdenbow
Would love to use this for my ecommerce site (StartupThreads) as we move to a
custom system.

Most interested in the shipping price comparison: what providers are you
supporting?

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jstreebin
I'm looking at starting with USPS, FedEx, and UPS

~~~
Aqua_Geek
Out of curiosity, how are you doing this? IIRC a few years ago when I was
playing around with the FedEx API it explicitly forbade using it for price
comparison with other carriers.

Are there aggregator APIs that you're using? Or have the T&C changed?

~~~
marcrosoft
It is still the same, you can't even have other carrier rates near UPS rates.

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mindslight
Somewhat related question - are these types of services capable of printing
first class letter postage ie something to use in place of a "forever" stamp?

~~~
jstreebin
The closest I've seen/done for this is a $1.64 stamp for first class 1 oz.
Agree, this would be very nice to have

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shreep
Very nice. Would you plan to offer international shipping options ? Just out
of curiosity, what mapping engine are you using to geocode?

~~~
jstreebin
Planning on offering int'l but starting with domestic

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lbotos
Looking at your images of code they look blurry on Mac. Just a friendly heads
up. :) Besides that, Looks like a great idea. Cheers!

~~~
jstreebin
Thanks! I noticed that, too, but was thinking it was a Retina issue.
Apparently not. Will fix

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shiftb
Interesting. I could immediately use the simple address verification.

I wonder what the return value of a purchase call is?

~~~
jstreebin
I'm planning on making it a URL to a pdf of the postage...that work?

~~~
waterside81
I think USPS labels are returned as PNGs - would probably be easier to just
shoot that back, no? At least our method of generating USPS labels (Stamps.com
API) shoots back PNGs.

~~~
jstreebin
Ah, okay. Yes, that'd be easier. Other services provide PDFs but agree PNGs
better

~~~
biot
You could bake this into the REST API via the "Accept:" header. The default
when not specified is whatever you set, but the caller can specify "Accept:
image/png" to get a PNG image, "Accept: application/pdf" for PDF, and so on
for whatever other types of output you support. The advantage of PDF (or SVG
even) is that, if it was constructed using text/vectors, the output resolution
is limited only by the capabilities of the printer.

~~~
jstreebin
Ah, great idea. I like that

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kmfrk
Could you add syntax-highlighting to the examples?

Using httpie as an alternative to curl would also make that easier. :)

~~~
jstreebin
Great feedback, thanks!

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zachwill
Really interesting idea. Could seriously see myself using this.

~~~
jstreebin
Great, what's your use case?

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benlower
I didn't realize Dirk Diggler lived in Half Moon Bay.

~~~
jstreebin
Word, Reed and Dirk had to get out of dodge

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jjohn
did a kind of similar project a few weekends back:
<http://scrubmyaddress.com/> :)

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stefanobernardi
Missing a comma in the first screenshot ;)

~~~
jstreebin
ack! fixed!

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highace
Ugh, I'm starting to get sick of Bootstrap. You've got a great idea and you
remove value from it with bootstrap... How integral can your product be if you
can't even give it a unique UI?

~~~
crcsmnky
I disagree. Given what the app is about, I don't care about the UI. In fact,
I'd rather they spend more time on the backend than on the website - at least
to get started. Bootstrap is familiar, it's not bad - there's a difference.

Once the service is proven to work and they've got customers, I'm sure a UI
refresh would happen. At this stage it's probably more important to worry
about the things that matter most to the longevity of the project.

~~~
jstreebin
Agreed. Stuck between working on the product and working on UI I chose an
admittedly weak UI (I'm not crazy about it but it works) so I could work on
more important, for now, pieces of the product

~~~
highace
I respectfully disagree with both of you. This shouldn't be a case of not
having enough time, make time and get both parts to a decent level. Creating a
bespoke splash page should be the easiest bit.

You need to take your developer hats off and put your salesmen hats on if you
want to sell your product.

~~~
girasquid
I respectfully disagree with you. :)

When I encounter a site with Bootstrap showing, I don't think "oh, this person
doesn't care about the value of having a custom UI, or doesn't know how to
sell their product" - I think "this person knows where their priorities lie,
and has optimized their effort towards the things that provide the most value
for their business". I'm sure when a custom UI becomes something more worth
prioritizing, it will be moved up the list of things to do.

~~~
oinksoft
Hm, my impression is more along the lines of, "this probably was hacked
together in a weekend and might be discarded in another." It's not a fair
impression, but my snap judgment is that if somebody is invested in their
product, they'd put a little time into differentiating its look.

However, the homepage for this product emphasizes its use as an API, so I am
not very concerned about look and feel at all, and am much more interested in
API docs. It looks like these are not ready yet.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year with service providers and
vendors as lead developer/devops/sysadmin/etc at a tech consulting firm in
Chicago.

I don't give a damn how the site looks; if you're solving a problem I need to
get solved, I'm taking my Amex out to pay for it if it makes our work easier.

~~~
jstreebin
Good to hear! You in the market for a solution like EasyPost? I'm at
jarrett@easypost.co and would love to chat!

~~~
toomuchtodo
I am! Will have an email off to your shortly!

