
Show HN: Subscription Score – A browser ext that identifies bad mailing lists - jivings
https://subscriptionscore.com
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jivings
Hey HN! I work on a web app that makes it easy to unsubscribe from mailing
lists.

Last year we started building an algorithm to rank subscriptions, with the
intention of making it easier for our users to see at a glance what they
should unsubscribe from and what they should keep.

We trialed this functionality within the app for a few months and quickly
realised that it could be useful as a tool to protect people from signing up
to bad mailing lists in the first place.

Currently, when you hand over your email address to a website or service,
there is very little way to know how responsible they will be with it and how
many emails they will send you.

Our goal is to help cut down on the amount of unwanted spam we all receive in
our inboxes, and we think that addressing this information inequality is an
important step in this direction.

So today we're releasing a browser extension to do just that! If the website
you are currently visiting is known to send mailing lists, then we show you
our Subscription Score rank for those lists in browser toolbar.

To help further, if the extension notices that you are signing up on a website
with a bad score, then it will show you an alert, warning you that the site
may spam your inbox if you hand over your email address.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and questions!

~~~
li_am
This is a really great idea, I just feel the value proposition at $6/m or even
the $3/m isn't justified to me.

That's putting you above my iCloud sub and barely below my Google sub, only a
little below what I'm paying for Netflix.

I guess I'm just tiring from subscription fatigue.

Edit: Just want to add, unfortunately the few minutes of time I currently
spend curating my email is worth far less than the cost. While it might appeal
to a niche subset of SV users I just can't see the value proposition for
anyone else.. I guess it's a question of your cost of service vs potential
addressable market.

~~~
jivings
Thanks! Yessss, we did think it could be difficult to sell a browser extension
on subscription. The market possibly suffers from a similar fate as app store
sales - people are very used to getting them for free!

That said we've had a few sales today, so we'll see how it goes. If it doesn't
work out then it's fairly easy to tweak the price, or we could offer a
freemium version.

Though my instinct tells me that if users wouldn't even pay $3/m for something
then it probably hasn't got great product market fit and we need to change our
approach!

~~~
Phrenzy
I currently use and pay $11/year for pinboard. I am very happy with the
service and I gladly renew every year. I am not much of a newsletter
subscriber, but your plugin may help change my mind.

However, your service is not worth over three times the cost I am currently
paying to keep track of my internet bookmarks.

But I also realize I am a bit of an outlier. I host my own music server rather
than use Spotify. I run my own Nextcloud service rather than use Dropbox. I
run my own Plex server rather than subscribe to Netflix. I cancelled my Amazon
Prime after they raised the price. I didn't use their streaming services and I
can wait another day or two for the junk I just bought.

Hopefully this info will help you and your company.

~~~
dannyw
Spotify offers a lot more value per dollar than this.

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sixhobbits
How is the score calculated? One example has "high" unsubscribe rate but a
9.99 score. Another one has a high score but a "tedious" description.

The scores just felt a bit off to me from the examples.

I agree with some other comments that suggest this is valuable data but I
would suggest giving it to consumers for free and allow them to vote to give
you better data and then charge newsletter creators for the data and ways to
improve their score.

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alphabettsy
I love this, but it costs too much. $5-15/year maybe, but $3-6/month
definitely not.

~~~
AdriaanvRossum
It's $3 a month! That's around the price of a cheap cup of coffee in the US. I
don't get why people can say in the same sentence: "I love this product" and
"it's too expensive". You are not willing to pay the same amount as one cup of
coffee a month for it? It blows my mind.

~~~
rozenmd
Because it's not a cup of coffee.

You're more or less guaranteed a consistent taste when you order a cup of
coffee. Not so much when buying a subscription to a random SaaS from the HN
front page. Trust is a significant issue here.

Coffee also doesn't require commitment. I can walk out of the shop, and say
"that's my last coffee", and that'll be the end of it. No hunting down
unsubscribe/cancel buttons, etc.

I mean as someone building their own SaaS, I totally get the frustration. But
anchoring your price to coffee isn't as useful as say, what people pay for
Dropbox, VPS/VPN or email providers.

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nif2ee
it seems you're good with playing the cheap viral game on product hunt, but
probably that kind of cheap tricks doesn't work very well here.

