
PopcornNotify – Send simple emails and text messages from one API - FriedPickles
https://popcornnotify.com/
======
ollerac
Although I truly think this is a fantastic product, both in the simplicity of
the offering and the simplicity of the API, I was a little concerned about
being able to use my own domain and phone number when sending messages, for
the sake of building trust with my users. Also, I (selfishly, perhaps) have
more faith in the reliability of an established service than something
recently launched.

For anyone who has similar concerns and wants to use something more
customizable and reliable like Mailgun/Twilio, but wants access to the same
elegant API showcased here, you can use something like this (admittedly naive)
implementation:

    
    
      const mailgun = require('mailgun-js')({apiKey: api_key, domain: domain});
      const twilio = new require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken);
    
      export default function notify (to, msg, options) {
        if (Array.isArray(to)) {
          to.forEach((toSingle) => notify(toSingle, msg, options));
          return;
        }
    
        if (to.includes("@")) {
          mailgun.messages().send({
            from: 'Your name <yourname@example.com>', // your email
            to: to,
            subject: options && options.subject,
            text: msg
          });
        } else {
          twilioClient.messages.create({
              body: msg,
              to: to,
              from: '+5555555555' // your number
          });
        }
      }
    

This implementation wouldn't require that much extra effort to set up
initially (i.e. signing up for two API credentials instead of one and
installing two packages instead of one), but it gives you a lot more
flexibility to configure the _from_ address and phone number and might help
you sleep easier at night.

However, as a fellow startup founder, I think it's noble to support newer
projects like this. As such, I've signed up for an account and plan to test it
out for at least a month.

~~~
igammarays
Yeah, you are probably not the target market for this lovely hobby project.
Email service reliability matters, and is a very difficult problem at scale.
This is why my team has been working on a production-ready, enterprise version
of a unified email API for about a year now, that's free for up to 100k
messages/month, and has functionality that you couldn't easily build yourself,
like auto-failover over multiple providers, full-text elasticsearch of your
email history/logs, and a non-technical interface for your customer support
team to easily view your recipients email history.

Send me a tweet @flutemail if you're interested, I'll let you know when it's
ready (should be in about a month).

~~~
josephxanderson
I would definitely like to be part of this as well. Not on Twitter so I can’t
tweet you but if you could reach out to me I’d appreciate it.

~~~
igammarays
Absolutely. How can I reach you? Or just email isa at flutemail.com

------
aezell
That pricing isn't too bad for SMS messages but it is VERY high for emails.
Simplicity has value but I'm not sure it has that much value.

~~~
a13n
It's basically 10x what Mailgun charges, which is pretty reasonable overhead
imo. $10 to send 1,000 email notifications to your team is peanuts. People
will 100% pay that.

~~~
classics2
Why would I pay to send an email?

~~~
shaunray
Beacause these types of services go to great effort to keep their repuation
high on email services. You use these services so your 1000's emails get
delivered instead of being rated as spam or being blacklisted.

~~~
kuschku
My self-run mail server I set up before I had any sysadmin knowledge also has
high reputation, isn’t on any blacklist, and successfully is rated non-spam by
Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and all others.

Is there something special why you’d need to pay for a product such as
mailgun, and not just something like the ISPmail guide suggests?

Both for small bootstrapped projects, and for larger companies it should be
cheaper to just run it yourself.

~~~
shakna
> My self-run mail server I set up before I had any sysadmin knowledge also
> has high reputation, isn’t on any blacklist, and successfully is rated non-
> spam by Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and all others.

That is most definitely not the norm. Entire ISPs get blacklisted on a regular
basis, working around that is difficult.

There are a lot of hurdles to hosting an email service, and some of them are
geographic, and out of your immediate control.

If things are difficult... Why wouldn't you pay to make the hassles go away
all together?

~~~
kuschku
Hm, I’ve just never actually seen that. I started out with the ispmail guide
plus SPF/DKIM/DMARC tutorial from linode and DO, and applies those on my cheap
server. Just worked, never had issues (and this is the fifth server already,
previously I’ve been with OVH, Hetzner, Online.net and KimSufi).

It’s just, I can’t believe that it’s just luck that I never had these issues.
Is it luck? Is it because people try configuring email without such tutorials
(which actually would be quite complicated)? Is it because people with no
devops experience try it?

On the other hand, if a devops engineer can set it up in a day, it’ll cost you
~270€ (taking a usual European salary for such a person), which would you get
27000 emails with this service. So it might actually be worth it.

~~~
ek750
I’m curious what sort of email you’re sending and at what volume. Depending on
the use case, it may be easy to start clean, but if you’re sending millions of
emails a day, you may find it difficult to keep that clean reputation.

It’s certainly not impossible but takes more work as you scale up. I think
that’s part of the attraction of these services. Pay for it to be their
problem (in theory anyway) :)

------
needcaffeine
Great product! FYI that your terms page is broken:
[https://popcornnotify.com/terms](https://popcornnotify.com/terms)

------
nautical
Hi FriedPickles, Great product first of all, liked the simplicity of the
product, I am also working on somewhat similar product,
[https://ingwe.io](https://ingwe.io) . I am planning to launch on hn in couple
of days, best of luck :)

~~~
Akhilma93
Is this available to use right now? Would like to have a demo

~~~
nautical
Yes, please go ahead signup, its free for starting couple of days. Ping me on
help anytime.

------
nicky0
I can't find information on which countries text messages can be delivered to.

------
thomasdd
Found v=spf1 record for email.popcornnotify.com: v=spf1 include:sendgrid.net
~all

~~~
melq
To those less familiar with email standards.. this means the 3rd party service
send grid are the ones actually sending mail on their behalf.

More specifically, SPF exists for a domain owner (in this case,
popcornnotify.com) to specify who is authorized to send mail on behalf of the
host email.popcornnotify.com. This is set in a DNS record and used by spam
filters to prevent spoofing and such.

------
vortico
Seems to be a quarter of the price of
[https://textbelt.com/](https://textbelt.com/)

------
paulrosenzweig
I _love_ the simplicity. Really well done project.

------
mahesh_rm
Great Simple Project. Does this send SMS all over the world, or just US and/or
Europe?

~~~
534b44a
Probably US only. The cheapest EU prices I'm used to are normally around x5
more expensive for SMS.

------
kMitnick18
Which countries supports sending SMS?

------
matchilling
Really like the simplicity of the project, well executed ! Good luck with it
and I hope that you will resist any feature requests which will turn the
product into another Mailgun/ Twilio etc.

There is an audience for every (useful) product!

------
davidcamel
I love how simple this is, but does it support including email attachments? I
couldn't determine that based on the content of the website.

EDIT: similarly, does it support MMS in addition to SMS?

------
skrebbel
I think this is a nice idea, but I'm worried about the, let's be honest,
needless single point of failure this adds to my architecture. Nothing this
does ought to be more than a 100 line open source project (which is not
criticism btw - if you can monetize a tiny codebase, more power to you!). But
because it's SaaS, you need to depend on someone else to keep their service up
and running.

Because of that simple reason, I'd only use this for optional stuff, but I
struggle to think of a use case where notifications are optional.

ps. that said, this is a very attractive service to send SMS to Europe. I know
of no service that undercuts $0.10 per SMS to European countries unless you
buy in huge bulks.

~~~
mgkimsal
> I know of no service that undercuts $0.10 per SMS to European countries
> unless you buy in huge bulks.

Twilio looks to be under $0.10 for more than a few european countries I
checked:

[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/ch](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/ch)
[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/de](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/de)
[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/es](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/es)
[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/se](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/se)
[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/fi](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/fi)
[https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/nl](https://www.twilio.com/sms/pricing/nl)

~~~
skrebbel
Oh wow! Things got cheaper since last I checked, thanks!

~~~
mgkimsal
Cool. I've noticed a couple of price drops in the last couple of years,
although I don't do any european SMS right now, it's good to know.

Looks like plivo has some good rates too:

[https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ES/#!sms](https://www.plivo.com/pricing/ES/#!sms)
[https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FR/#!sms](https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FR/#!sms)
[https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FI/#!sms](https://www.plivo.com/pricing/FI/#!sms)
[https://www.plivo.com/pricing/SE/#!sms](https://www.plivo.com/pricing/SE/#!sms)

The monthly cost of a number with plivo seems a bit higher, overall, but also
looks like they have free incoming SMS, which may end up being a much better
deal for some use cases.

------
mlrtime
Why not just amazon sns to send sms? A few lines of boto code and you're
running.

------
PhilipA
I like the clear messaging - do you want more complex/advanced options go
elsewhere. You even link to the competitors.

Well done.

------
kraig911
Can't easily find how much it costs? I definitely want to try it out :)

~~~
ollerac

      Pricing: API keys cost $10 for each 1,000 messages and last one year.
    

It's right above the BUY API KEY button.

~~~
juancampa
I don't see it either. Maybe an A/B experiment gone wrong?

~~~
Moter8
[https://i.imgur.com/h7gtV4L.png](https://i.imgur.com/h7gtV4L.png)

It's just fairly small and not distinguished.

------
borplk
FYI link to Twilio is broken.

