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.
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.
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.
Not sure how many emails you send a day, but I signed up for sendgrid almost immediately after I learned it existed.
ISPs have lots of arbitrary policies. For periods of time my emails have been blocked from AOL and AT&T accounts, which make for a lot of headaches and support emails to deal with. (I'm just sending out forum registration, activation and thread subscription emails. no mass mailings.) For a while, we just told people to use non-AOL addresses.
Also, I haven't noticed a delay in email deliverability. It seems to deliver quickly.
Edit: If it matters, for reference, my forum sends out 6000-7000 emails a day.
I use SendGrid, too. It was a no-brainer: $80 a month is cheap, I am expensive. I was quite expensive indeed dealing with persistent minor clusterflops like, e.g., automated forum spambots for the forum I host for college debaters (an old hobby) caused the BCC mailserver they were freeloading off of to have enough of a spike that a large multinational advertising company decided BCC "Thanks for paying me $30 Cindy, here's the software you just bought" emails needed to be consigned to the seventh circle of hell sandwiched between Viagra spam and their own customer support requests.
For us it's just another thing that's not our core competency which we're happy to have outsourced so that other people worry about security/maintenance etc... Similar rationale for using Spreedly [1] for subscription billing.
In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well.
We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch!
I don't think you're wrong — I just think that for $80, we get a lot of peace of mind once we were sending thousands of mails per day. Particularly because we're sending job notifications to translators too — so if they don't see them, they might not think to check spam.
In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.
This isn't a technical question, it's an economics question. If you would rather put in effort than dollars, then do it yourself, and it will work great for a while. But if your business takes off, you will accumulate email-related problems like bacteria, and suddenly that $20/month starts to sound reeal worth it.
My company uses it because we run our web front ends on various cloud providers, most of whose IP space is blacklisted. I don't even bother to verify that they are anymore and just assume that they are. Sendgrid gets rid of this entirely, which is a pretty big win.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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 :)
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
I'm using critsend.com - it's just "pay as you go", not a monthly fee. $1/1000, with discounts as you go up in credit purchases. I've had no problems with them in the last year or so. No - I take that back - the bounce stats data was 'lost' from my display for a couple days, but the retrieved it and added it back in. Happened once, IIRC - generally nice people, and there's an IRC channel for help if you want that (in addition to standard other help channels).
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.
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.
[+] [-] petenixey|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simplegeek|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swombat|15 years ago|reply
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|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] arn|15 years ago|reply
ISPs have lots of arbitrary policies. For periods of time my emails have been blocked from AOL and AT&T accounts, which make for a lot of headaches and support emails to deal with. (I'm just sending out forum registration, activation and thread subscription emails. no mass mailings.) For a while, we just told people to use non-AOL addresses.
Also, I haven't noticed a delay in email deliverability. It seems to deliver quickly.
Edit: If it matters, for reference, my forum sends out 6000-7000 emails a day.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlivsey|15 years ago|reply
In the future it may be the case that we move that in house, but right now it's working out really well.
We're using PostMark [2] which amounts to $1.50 per 1000 emails, which is cheap enough for our uses. It's one less thing to worry about so we can focus on more important tasks such as finishing the v2 we're about to launch!
[+] [-] fookyong|15 years ago|reply
one of the points of SendGrid is that you pay them to worry about that, so you can concentrate on your core competency.
[+] [-] robert_mygengo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relix|15 years ago|reply
In there they admit that mails sent through Postmark still end up in Spam-folders or black holes. That was basically the only added value I'd get from using them.
[+] [-] robgwin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smhinsey|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insight|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_mygengo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mono|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_mygengo|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] megablast|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GBond|15 years ago|reply
That is the most underwhelming endorsement of salesforce.com I've ever seen.
[+] [-] jread|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bengl3rt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fookyong|15 years ago|reply
They both solve a problem that is otherwise quite complicated and boring to solve, in a very simple, hassle-free way.
[+] [-] robert_mygengo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arn|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dylanz|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dickeytk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ladon86|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Klonoar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshfraser|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshfraser|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aymeric|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_mygengo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cplamper|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sad_hacker|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Schmelson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_mygengo|15 years ago|reply