

Web Services Our Startup Relies On Every Day - robert_mygengo
http://mygengo.com/talk/blog/15-web-services-we-rely-on-every-day/

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petenixey
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
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
>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
two words - "opportunity cost".

~~~
coderdude
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?

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swombat
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.

~~~
simonw
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.

~~~
moe
_Getting high deliverability is actually incredibly complicated._

Urban legend.

 _You need a dedicated IP address to send mail from, which you need to be
whitelisted by the big ESPs_

That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs
"whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and _after_ you've been
blacklisted, in order to get _unlisted_.

 _To get it whitelisted, you need to "warm it up" before you start using it
properly._

Nonsense.

 _You need to be very careful about setting the right headers. You need
reverse DNS configured correctly, you need SPF and DomainKeys set up_

Yes, there's a few things to watch out for, but it's all pretty well
documented nowadays and you only have to do it _once_. SPF is pretty easy with
<http://old.openspf.org/wizard.html>

_you need to make sure the IP/domain you are sending from hasn't previously
been used for spam_

A quick check at a few of the largest blacklists (spamhaus et al) takes all of
5 minutes. Another 5 minutes that you have to spend exactly _once_.

 _[..further marketing pitch for MTA SaaS snipped..]_

Well, to sum this up.

It seems many people have a strong misconception of what SendGrid, MailGun and
friends actually _do_. You don't magically get higher deliverability only
because your mail is passing through them. They don't have mythical
"whitelist" slots at the ESPs. They're not even on the radar of the ESPs.

What you get from SendGrid et al is a (hopefully) properly configured MTA and
DNS, to push your mail through. From there your outbound mail is suspect to
all the usual blacklisting and scrutiny at the receiving endpoints. And that's
all - no black magic at work here.

~~~
bobds
> That is nonsense. Nobody reaches out to the ESPs to have their IPs
> "whitelisted" in advance. You reach out when, if and after you've been
> blacklisted, in order to get unlisted.

That's nonsense, lots of people do that. Only you don't usually go direct to
the service provider, see following links:

<http://www.returnpath.net/commercialsender/certification/>

<http://www.spamhauswhitelist.com/en/>

<http://www.certified-senders.eu/csa_html/en/266.htm>

~~~
moe
_That's nonsense, lots of people do that._

Lots of people also believe in astrology. Anyone is free to do what they deem
good for their karma, you just shouldn't expect a measurable impact towards
your deliverability. The big ESPs don't look at these lists.

~~~
bobds
> The big ESPs don't look at these lists.

Some of them do.

AOL uses GoodMailSystems.

<http://postmaster.aol.com/Postmaster.Whitelist.php>

<http://www.goodmailsystems.com/>

Hotmail uses ReturnPath.

<http://mail.live.com/mail/services.aspx#Safelist>

Yahoo seems to run their own. I remember them using one of the big ones but I
can't find any mention in their help pages now.

<http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/bulkv2.html>

Google only asks for best practices, but it's possibly they look at some of
the whitelists for more data.

<https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=81126>

~~~
moe
Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These
commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings.

Their sole purpose is to extract money from you. They're businesses, that is
their business model.

The value they provide in return is rather minimal - unless getting e-mail out
is at the very core of your business and you need to pull every last string to
absolutely maximize it.

Otherwise there are cheaper ways to get reasonable deliverability even at AOL
and Hotmail. The _default_ deliverability is already quite good, which is what
services like SendGrid largely bargain on. I firmly doubt SendGrid signs each
of their customers up for the aforementioned whitelists. They probably offer
"assistance" with the process, which probably amounts to sending you a link to
a nice HowTo document, and which probably yields them a small affiliate
kickback when you actually follow through.

~~~
bobds
> Oh my, do I have to put it even more bluntly to get the point across: These
> commercial whitelists are effectively extortion scams and affiliate rings.

You made a few points.

First is that nobody reaches out to get themselves whitelisted in advance.
Lots of people do that and some ESPs even offer their own whitelist request
forms.

Second is that none of the big ESPs look at third-party whitelists. AOL and
Hotmail say they do.

Third is that even if the above is true, the impact on deliverability is
minimal. I would guess you are right about that but I'd love to look at some
data.

Intermediaries like SendGrid would be well within reason to be paying for such
services. I don't think they have to signup their individual customers on the
whitelists. They just say they are intermediaries and promise to vet their
customers.

I think anyone sending low volumes of email is much better off using an
intermediary. They get to use well-configured mail servers, IPs with good
reputation, etc. Doing it yourself, IMHO, is not worth all the trouble
compared to paying $20/month.

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

~~~
robert_mygengo
LOL. I guess we make shovels too though. So no biggie.

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mono
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
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
Thanks for this long version! Might learn to stop trying to maintain every
solution on myself.

------
megablast
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.

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GBond
>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.

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

~~~
bengl3rt
This looks really cool. I'm glad I found it!

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fookyong
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.

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robert_mygengo
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?

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arn
I'll add to the list my favorite service I don't ever hear talked about.
SpamStopsHere:

<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.

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dylanz
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 :)

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dickeytk
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

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ladon86
Does anyone recommend any SendGrid alternatives? They look good, I'm just
wondering if anyone has had success with another provider also.

~~~
Klonoar
Postmark App (<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.

~~~
rodh257
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

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Rob1979
In our usage, Sendgrid never complained. No particular knowledge about
specific usages.

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

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

~~~
robert_mygengo
Should be OK now. 600 concurrent users is big for us.

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cplamper
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.

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

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Schmelson
Yeah, office Glico is the besssssttt!

~~~
robert_mygengo
Finally, some love for the Gleec.

