
Show HN: Send a fax to 50 countries, no signup, account or subscription required - kunle
https://www.faxrocket.com/
======
schnevets
This looks absolutely fantastic! Does anyone else feel like Show HNs with
straightforward, by-the-order pricing is always based on declining technology
(Fax; SMS; Printing in the case of Bingo Card Creator)? I guess it has to do
with the customer base?

~~~
dsr_
It's the predictable margin between cost to provide service and the value of
convenience to the customers.

The marginal cost of sending a fax is, arguably, about one cent. (1.8c/min
VOIP cost, 30 seconds to send, some electricity). Most faxes will be one page
anyway, so the profit margin is a nice 10000%.

Finding a working fax machine if you don't have one sitting around all set up
is a hassle on the order of 10 minutes to an hour, and likely to end up with a
visit to a UPS/FedEx/Staples or the equivalent thereof, where they will charge
you $1.50-$2 for the first page anyway.

Find a cheap old technology that people want to use infrequently and are
therefore willing to pay a relatively large markup for convenience. Let's
see... appointmentreminder already does voice calls for reminders, but how
about automated, customized calls? Get a good speech synthesis app and let
people send _and schedule_ calls that read out whatever they want to type.
That's probably worth a buck to people who only want to do it once, and then
you can offer a subscription rate for frequent flyers.

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abbasaamer
Cool! I use one of your competitors, Fax Fresh. One thing I like about them is
that they clearly state they delete the fax from their servers once it's sent.
I couldn't find such a statement in your privacy policy (though maybe I missed
it). Can you elaborate on what happens to my fax after it's sent? Is it
deleted from your server?

~~~
fomojola
Ah, we do delete the file as soon as the fax is confirmed as delivered: its in
our FAQ at
[https://www.faxrocket.com/faq.html](https://www.faxrocket.com/faq.html). We
will update the privacy policy to include a reference to that.

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foobaw
How does your company manage to use Stripe and Paypal for microtransactions
with their fees? Do you get a special discount? 25 cents - minus fees means
there's barely any left.

~~~
captain_murdock
I'm not sure about the answer to your question about different fees for
microtransactions, but with their pricing, you would never get charged 25
cents. The minimum charge is $1.

The first four pages are $1, which I'm assuming is partly to cover that issue
of their charge getting eaten up by payment fees.

~~~
kunle
This is correct.

The top payment processors all have a fixed component to their fees - we just
absorb it into our pricing structure.

~~~
foobaw
The transaction fee for $1 is still a lot. For example, in Stripe's case it
would be 2.9% + 30¢ so about 33 cents. I guess if that's an acceptable margin,
it's no big deal, but I was just curious if your company got discounted fees.

~~~
axonic
Yeah I wonder if they'd be willing to negotiate since this is a little
different from the usual 99¢ app or whatnot. Sounds like a good service. No
ads on faxes/covers, straight pricing, on demand without a subscription... All
I'd need.

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MichaelGG
This is really cool! I rarely send faxes but it's always a pain when I do and
all the sites feel like they're from the 90s.

Do you have your J2 situation sorted out yet? They're suit-happy.

~~~
kunle
J2?

~~~
emddudley
[https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jayson-demers/is-google-
compl...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jayson-demers/is-google-complicit-
in-j2_b_3749749.html)

> J2 Global operates numerous, nearly identical websites such as eFax.com,
> RapidFax.com, MyFax.com, MetroFax.com, SmartFax.com and Fax.com that all
> offer the same internet fax services. As a result, J2 effectively controls
> over 90% of the internet fax market.

> ... the methodology of litigation that J2 employs has allowed for them to
> sue any competitors for infringing on a patent held by J2 over all faxes
> using an email, regardless of whether they are using PHP, SMTP or .NET
> gateways in the emails.

~~~
fencepost
As a note because it's not clear from searches, the "Integrated Global
Concepts" in that article owned Maxemail.com, which was taken over by J2 in
late 2016.

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brut
I was asked to look for an online fax solution. A provider I contacted never
called me back. Do you offer subscriptions even if they are not needed? I know
next to nothing about faxing - how is the transmitted data secured? Is it?

~~~
kunle
We currently don’t offer subscriptions, as were just starting out.

Out of curiosity what’s your use case? There are lots of subscription fax
services out there (efax and hellofax are 2 popular ones)

~~~
brut
Faxing medical documents.

~~~
fencepost
SRFax lists healthcare solutions on its site, and Faxage says "All of our fax
service plans come with HIPAA compliance standard - No need for a 'special'
plan or to pay extra for HIPAA related security features" and you can contact
them for a BAA.

Other than that you can do things in-house with Hylafax and either hardware
(e.g. Mainpine boards, expensive but they Just Work) or software solutions. My
experience with software solutions (IAXModem with Hylafax and Asterisk) has
been that speeds and reliability are sometimes poor, at least compared to good
hardware solutions or physical fax machines supporting 33.6k.

~~~
barkingtoad
HylaFAX Enterprise is a full SW solution, (roughly) HylaFAX plus the Dialogic
SR140 which does both T.38 (new school fax) and G.711 (old school telephony
fax). But generally it's 14.4k - believe it or not V.34 (33.6k) is still
somewhat experimental over IP.

And 9600 is usually required to get faxes through to a lot of places, because
everyone is trying to do fax over VoIP, and that is generally tough sledding,
if it's possible at all.

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ac29
So, if you send 1 short fax/week (@ $1 for 1-4 pages), your breakeven point
just buying a fax machine ($30-50 for entry level on Amazon, new) is less than
a year?

I work for a business that could use a low-volume faxing service, but the
price needs to come down an order of magnitude.

~~~
psquid
The lack of subscription and signup, combined with the pricing, suggest that
this is aiming at people who almost never send a fax, and would spend
significantly more buying and maintaining a fax machine, compared to a couple
dollars on this service.

I do hope you find a service that fits your need, but this is very likely not
intending to be it.

~~~
ac29
Right, but is it a viable business if the average customer spends $1-2/year or
less?

A business phone line ($100/month or less -- crap tier VOIP lines work fine
for faxes) and a PCI fax/modem (<$50) should let you send hundreds of pages an
hour with no paper or other consumables. It certainly seems like a send-only
service that charges $0.01/page is more than viable. Even averaging only a
page a minute would be $15/day in revenue, a huge profit margin.

~~~
wbl
If they have enough customers, then yes.

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moxplod
This is cool - will definitely use it next time i have to send fax to the
city!

Had a similar idea/pain point and I built a similar tool for sending postal
mail - [http://simplepostal.com/](http://simplepostal.com/)

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dvt
This is awesome! Just out of curiosity, who (or what) do you use on the back-
end? Is there like a Twilio for faxes?

~~~
fomojola
Hey, thanks. Twilio actually does do faxes, but this was built prior to Twilio
dipping their toes into the fax waters. We use Phaxio
([https://www.phaxio.com/](https://www.phaxio.com/)): the API is nice and
clean and we've had an entirely happy time working with it.

~~~
rabidonrails
w00t!

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giarc
I think this is great. Existing products/sites aren't always kept up to date
and you never know if they are still functioning.

Before working in an office, when I needed to fax a document I would have to
drive to a Staples/Post Office or find a friend with an old fax machine.

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interfixus
No snark, I'm genuinely surprised: Does anyone still use faxes anywhere on the
planet?

I sent my last fax twelve years ago, and considered that a retrograde outlier.
Some agency requiring a signed piece of paper, not accepting my emailed pdf
with a pasted in scrawl, but all roses and _thank you, sir_ when same document
uploaded to a random webservice and faxed. I do occasionally give up on
Humanity.

~~~
icelancer
Yes. Deal with government and/or the medical industry and you'll be sending
upwards of 100/month in a small business.

~~~
robbiemitchell
Correct: HIPAA requires mail, fax, or secure web portal. And lots of doctors
are small businesses without sophisticated IT investments. Lots of faxing.

~~~
fencepost
I just recently learned about some stupid things going on at an oncology
practice I work with - for new patients they receive faxed charts from other
practices, and they're regularly 250+ pages.

Even if we get them set up with some form of HIPAA-compliant secure file
transfer service I'm not sure how well it'll work because while I can train
and work with the people at that practice, there's not much I can do about the
people sending them charts. Best thing I've come up with so far as a quick fix
is setting up inbound faxing on their VOIP system with a pool of inbound lines
- speed is slower, but they can receive multiple at once and none of them are
tying up the main fax line for 3+ hours at a time.

------
denzil_correa
I was looking for some online fax services recently and stumbled upon another
similar service Fax.to The main difference - in terms of pricing - I see is
that Fax.to charges per page as a cost unit rather than Fax Rocket's 4 pages

[https://fax.to/destinations](https://fax.to/destinations)

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dhn901
It seems incongruous to use the Republic of China flag for Taiwan and yet
labelling it as Taiwan, Province of China.

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sdrothrock
Any plans for an API to make it possible to upload and send a fax from a web
app? This looks exactly like what we've been looking for for a while.

Also, how does your pricing vary by country, if at all? I know some providers
(e.g. HelloFax) charge WAY more for our target country (Japan).

~~~
fomojola
In terms of pricing, we're not doing any country-level price discrimination:
same rate, wherever you are sending to.

Send us an email (team@faxrocket.com) with what you'd like to see from an API?
Haven't yet looked at building one, but happy to either see what we can do or
point you at the right place if there's a better option.

------
floatingatoll
What are your anti-abuse protections?

~~~
kunle
Hey there - not sure what you mean?

~~~
mplewis
How will you prevent someone from sending spammy unsolicited faxes?

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24gttghh
It's not free.

~~~
xachen
Having worked for a fax brand.. that doesn't stop shady characters from just
using stolen card numbers. It's extremely common.

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Danihan
Where is the list of 50 countries? The link doesn't seem to work for me.

~~~
fomojola
The list, as requested:
[https://www.faxrocket.com/faq.html#!/displaycountries](https://www.faxrocket.com/faq.html#!/displaycountries)
(not sure if HN will include the hash, but the FAQ page has that information).

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TuxMulder
Nice. How do you fund this without taking emails or requiring a subscription?

~~~
saurik
While this service is pretty clear in that you just pay for each fax, one
could easily imagine a _free_ service that collected fax machine phone numbers
and then later begins sending lots of fax spam.

~~~
mgerdts
Many years ago a company kept waking me up in the middle of the night with
repeated attempts to deliver junk faxes to my home number. That inspired me to
figure out how to use some fax software with my faxmodem (see, many years ago)
to capture one of them. They became keen on getting me off their list when I
asked for damages under the junk fax law.

------
markdown
Looks good :)

Would you mind sharing how you chose which countries to support?

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guiseppecalzone
Removed (see comments below). Thanks for the wisdom petertb.

~~~
icebraining
Generally it's considered a faux pas (and downvoted) to advertise on other
users' Show HN.

HN doesn't have an anti-commercial position like other forums, but competition
on Show HNs is heavily frowned upon, since we're supposed to be celebrating
the user's initiative and effort, not just look at a product.

~~~
rocky1138
Best way to do this is wait a few weeks then post your own service :) People
will then automatically begin discussing yours versus another one that was
posted recently, etc.

