

SendWrite launches API for physical mail - colevscode
https://sendwrite.com/developer/

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wizard_2
I wanted something like this a few years back for small scale billing. I
decided to partner with a local print shop who was able to get me a good
pricing on 2 color prints and envelops. I never was able to find a place with
a good API that handled low quantity orders with a reasonable price. ($0.45 a
bill)

Sendwrite is too expensive (obviously has a different target audience). I had
to sign up to get prices.

    
    
      1 Card - $2.99
      3 Cards - $7.99
      10 Cards - $24.99
      20 Cards - $39.80

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ericd
$0.45 per bill? Surely that wasn't the shipped price you were looking for -
stamps alone are 0.44 each... On top of that, it's a very labor intensive
service.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Metered mail costs significantly less than stamped mail. A quick check with
the USPS suggests a price of $0.237 per piece. That makes $0.45 per piece
pretty reasonable for a fully automated service, assuming a human never needs
to touch individual pieces of mail.

~~~
ericd
Fair point about metered stuff. I'd assume that it'd be extremely hard to
automate this unless it was constrained to one or a couple of types of mail,
though.

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dongle
Neat. Maybe I'll write a script to scrape my Google calendar and automatically
send birthday cards. Can see companies using this to send a personal note to
their best customers.

~~~
app8288
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but that's a great idea.

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ericd
I can see a ton of uses for this. Birthday cards, thank you cards for
customers, physical appointment reminders for doctors/dentists, having
petitions and online organizations that send harder-to-ignore physical mail to
your congress people.

With full color printing this becomes even more interesting - direct mailing
campaigns become feasible (if expensive) for startups, even with
customization.

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stfu
Awesome idea. There can be never enough interesting APIs around. I once talked
to a marketing guy who told me a tale about a campaign he did were he got a
bunch of housewives to write handwritten letters to a few hundred core
decision makers. Received extremely high response rates through this unusual
approach. Just mentioning it as a random idea - would be fun if people could
send out actually hand written cards through the service.

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Ein2015
PostalMethods has been doing this for years. <http://www.postalmethods.com/>

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jonpaul
There was another service that did this and did it well. But apparently it
isn't around anymore. It was called Mail Finch. Here is the Mixergy interview,
IMHO it's great: <http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/>

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dougb
The first I heard of a service like this was letters.com back in 1994. My
friend started it. He ended up selling the domain for 5 figures and went on to
do the webcounter at digits.com.

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jaylevitt
AOL used TeleMail/SprintMail for this around 1992; Sprint provided an X.400
gateway to both fax and US postal mail, but IIRC the postal mail gateway cost
something like $1/page and so nobody ever used it:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=Qa6bcZ0HuVUC&lpg=PA7...](http://books.google.com/books?id=Qa6bcZ0HuVUC&lpg=PA7&ots=bAXL9Kozzi&dq=\(%22telemail%22%20OR%20%22sprintmail%22\)%20x.400%20%22postal%22%20fax&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false)

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tonywebster
I think this is really cool and most definitely needed, but I think it needs
to have more than just cards. Certified Mail is a huge requirement for a lot
of businesses and right now there's no great solution for automating that --
at least nothing with any friendliness to developers.

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russell_h
This looks awesome. I have a bunch of thank you cards that I need to send (or
rather, I should have sent 3 months ago), so I may give it a shot. My one
concern is that you don't seem to get much control over formatting, as far as
I can tell the entire message is just a big string.

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colevscode
Hi russell. Right now the formatting is pretty simple. You can use whitespace
to break up the message or indent a paragraph. We're currently working on a
card designer interface that will allow much more customization. If you have
any specific requests please shoot me an email at cole (at) sendwrite.com.

~~~
JoshTriplett
Personally, I'd like to just upload a PDF of the appropriate size for your
card stock, and use my own formatting tools to produce that PDF.

(This looks _awesome_ , by the way.)

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cdcarter
With a single card costing just under $3 USD, this isn't an API I think I'll
be playing around with until I've got a really good idea, but I can't wait to
actually come up with something good.

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askedrelic
My current idea is a bit arty, something like: style for a month.

For 30 days, each day, scrape yesterday's image from
<http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/> or
<http://thesartorialist.blogspot.com/> (or just pick one at random) and use
the API to mail it myself. Eventually, I'll be getting a postcard a card of
cool style and get a cool physical collection.

I've seen this similarly with Flickr: email me each day with a photo I took 1
year ago (or some random old photo I took), so you always filtering through
your old collection. But maybe postcards will feel differently.

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Urgo
What I need is an api to tell me when there's mail in my PO box.

~~~
ericd
Earth Class Mail? I don't know if they have an API - they do have web access
and web-based mail reading, though.

~~~
tapp
No API yet, but they do send you an email notification.

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JoshTriplett
This looks awesome; I've wanted a service for sending mail for a while. Cards
seem like a nice place to start; hopefully they'll expand to a few other form
factors in the future.

Personally, I'd love to see this for a couple of data-related use cases:
mailing either USB disks or CDs based on an uploaded image.

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nitrogen
Back in 2001, a sufficiently large company could upload a .iso to an FTP
server, and Cinram (or other disc burning companies) would burn and ship on
demand. I'm pretty sure they had a web API that was integrated into the
ordering backend of my employer at the time.

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screeny
Love the idea. Wish there were more specs on the physical product. Sample
shots, for example.

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codeslush
Check this older thread out, along with comments:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300711> \-- maybe some synergy?

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jjacobson
An API for creating and sending physical things feels just plain awesome, even
though on a fundamental level ecommerce APIs do the same thing. Nice work.

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a3camero
Just US? I don't see any info on international mail.

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alexchamberlain
The UK has several companies doing this. For example,
<http://www.cfhdocmail.com/>

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jjacobson
I know you have a image preview on the site. Returning that through the API
would be cool too.

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danielamitay
A "Hello World" example might take a while to pan out.

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seanahrens
love it. keep up the great work, cole. let me know when it can automatically
prompt me to mail for my friend/family's birthdays.

