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Show HN: Laudspeaker – Open-source mobile push, SMS and email automation (github.com)

193 points by abe94 ↗ HN
Hey HN, we are sharing again, after a year of updates!

Laudspeaker (https://laudspeaker.com/) is an open source customer engagement suite (also called marketing automation software). If you've used tools like Braze, One Signal, Airship, Iterable, Customer.io or some others, Laudspeaker is an alternative to these. Here is a quick demo: https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4. And here is a link to sign up and try free (no cc needed): https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup.

Or if you prefer to just jump in, go to https://app.laudspeaker.com/login and use this test account:

  email: test94@laudspeaker.com
  pw: test93@laudspeaker.com
The main things Laudspeaker lets you do are:

1. Define 'segments': which of your users should receive messages.

2. Define 'messaging journeys': when, where and with which channels you want to reach users. Right now we support push, email, SMS, and soon we'll also include in-app messages and WhatsApp.

For example, one customer of ours runs a journey like this: "Wait for a user to complete onboarding on our mobile app, then send a welcome push. If they complete an action the next day on the app, stop sending messages, otherwise send a followup email."

There are quite a few big updates since our last Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559):

We now have a mobile SDK for sending and receiving push notifications. We have revamped the journey builder, and made our segment builder much more comprehensive. Our application is also a lot more battle tested - we are deployed with a major fintech in Asia and are sending XX million messages a week to more than x million users.

We've seen a lot of demand from consumer focused apps and websites who find most of the existing solutions' pricing models prohibitively expensive so please reach out if that sounds like you. We have successfully migrated people over from Braze, customer io and others.

If you're interested in the mobile SdK, see our tutorial: https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-mobi...,

and sample apps: https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-sample-app, https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app.

Our Github is https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker. Try it out for free at https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup.

We'd love to hear your feedback and comments!

35 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 86.9 ms ] thread
navigate8310
How is this comparable to Chatwoot, except the WABA integration?
abe94
Hey great question, a lot of services present themselves under the customer engagement banner so it can be hard to differentiate!

Chatwoot is a great tool, but is more in the customer support space. It offers a chat widget in your saas app / website and a shared interface to respond, which can then get routed via email, sms etc to the person who asked the question.

Laudspeaker is more of tool to send 1) one off messages (informational, promotional) to segments of users you define, 2) automate message sends like a drip campaign, 3) trigger automatic real-time messages based on specific activity users take in your app or site, eg on add to cart, or on sign up

The users of chatwoot would be customer support / success, the users of Laudspeaker would be growth, marketing, product

The architecture of both applications are quite different. Laudspeaker needs to be able to quickly message millions of users, ingest real time events, and create references to large sets (millions) of users.

We actually used chatwoot for support a while back, and have a customer who uses both Laudspeaker and chatwoot in production!

p2hari
I do not understand the pricing or maybe the license. On the website it shows self hosting only under enterprise plan. What does it mean. Can I not self host it if I am not an enterprise?
abe94
Hey yes you can self-host for free. our small team just can't provide support for free users.

We offer enterprise level support for self-hosting users in the paid plan, and they can use future features in our ee (enterprise) folder (which is empty right now)

alt227
I really like the 'free to use, pay for support' model.

Well done and good luck!

fragmede
except that means theres an perverse incentive to make things as difficult as possible so customers are incentivized to pay for support because they actually need it. And then someone comes along and offers easier setup as a product, along with competing support, for cheaper.
gumby
Would be great name for a device that just sang your praises all day.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tombert
Forgive a bit of ignorance on this, but it seems cool and I want some clarifying questions.

If I want to send SMS to a bunch of people, can I hook this into a self-hosted Asterisk server or something? Or does this have its own SMS gateway? Or am I forced to use a third party dealio like Twilio?

mcharawi
We have support for twilio natively since that's one of the popular options, but we also support webhooks as a channel, so if your Asterisk server has an HTTP endpoint that can trigger messages it would be compatible.
lxgr
Maybe I misunderstand, but how would you send SMS via an Asterisk server? Wouldn't you need an SMS gateway in the end anyway?
tombert
Yes, sorry, you would need some kind of TCP gateway or a SIM card.
ksajadi
Kudos on making this, especially after the huge price hike Customer.io just dropped on their customers.
abe94
Thanks yes - we've seen quite a few inbound customers to our SaaS as a result of this!

We are trying to find a pricing model that can work for consumer facing apps/sites and companies, as well as B2B!

memset
Awesome! What's the process for self-hosting?
mcharawi
If you're interested in an enterprise plan, we help you set up and scale self-hosting as part of the support contract for as long as you need. We have one-click infra-as-code to get you set up on multiple cloud providers with minimal devops intervention.

If you want to self host for free, the easiest way would be to run our docker compose on a compute instance-we're in the process of updating our docs for self hosting and I can email you with more info if you'd like.

ssijak
I dont understand your point that you are cheaper then others and work for b2c when pricing is very similar to other similar services.
mvkel
Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than anything else.

They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps do. For the project to thrive, there needs to be an existing fanbase to improve and support it.

Is what makes Wordpress great the fact that it's open source? No. It's the community of builders that surround it.

Would anyone realistically be willing to spin this stack up in their existing company (and sign up for maintaining it)?

I expect you'll get a few git clones from engineers to poke around to see how it was built, out of curiosity, but not much more.

Of course the natural response would be "who cares? They opened the source so you can if you want to!"

That's fair. I guess I just get stuck on the "why"

serial_dev
Sentry is in a similar boat, it's (almost) open source, and you need a very beefy machine to even start all the necessary services, it's not a simple set up by any means if you want a comparable experience to the real thing...

And still, people do get that done, and it is great that you have the self hosting option if you don't like their pricing (or if they ever go suddenly bankrupt, compromising your business).

domysee
I'm self-hosting Sentry together with Plausible Analytics. It's actually not that expensive, the VPS I'm using has 16 GB memory and 4 CPUs, and sets me back ~15€/month.

Not sure if there's enough free performance to run Loudspeaker, but I'm definitely considering it.

abe94
Hey, yes most companies would not want to self host, and for them there are plenty of options, but we do have companies that opt to self host. There are few reasons we have seen so far

- Operating in a regulated industry, we have customers who cannot send customer data to 3rd party services (in financial services, healthcare) and need to self host for that reason

- Existing solutions are too expensive for their business model, we have Kenyan, Brazilian and Mexican consumer focused companies from other countries spin up and use the self-hosted solution

- Cost savings and Philosophy, believe it or not there are some companies which like to self host software if possible, and have dedicated dev ops resources already maintaining software and spinning up another solution is not that much incremental work.

Beyond that there are other reasons to want to open source a solution like this. Anyone can add communication channels and integrations for example. And lastly its fun to work on an open code base!

jnsie
While I see your point (and largely feel the same way) I suppose the other side of it is pull requests. Nice to enable the community to provide supplemental software development.
sgc
This is an honest question, not a critique - because I don't know enough about this space to critique it. I am trying to understand when this is useful. It is not complete enough for a full CRM (phone calls, customer centric rather than workflow centric interface, basic replacement variables like %name%, push/pull integration with other communication suites like google workspace without jumping through hoops with custom webhooks,etc). So it can only be a partial solution, and it is quite expensive if you need to jump up a tier from the base tier. I can't see why I personally would pay for it, and I would not use it as an open-source library for a business application with that relatively viral open-source license.
mcharawi
Hey, happy to clear up the confusion! The software is similar to a CRM in that we message users/customers, though we don’t track things like the stage of a sales deal.

Our software and competitors like Braze are typically used in situations where you can’t have a personal connection, but still need to message users, often when they complete specific actions in your application, or if you want to send one-off promotions for example. E-commerce brands or a banking app might use us for example.

We do support replacement variables like you mentioned and are adding integrations actively.

sgc
Replacement variables are not very discoverable in the docs (I only found them after your comment, by using the ai assistant), and the docs don't reflect the app I see in your demo account (I see no personalize button when editing a template, and I don't know what it would do if it were there). I would recommend fleshing out the docs and linking them and/or the ai assistant in the app to make features more discoverable. twilio and stripe carved their market even more with documentation and code snippets than with features. Also, having a tier or three between 1 + 2 would be absolutely essential if you ever desired to get smaller businesses to use your product.
ssahoo
Why AGPL? Most corp's legal are allergic to that license.
AdriaanvRossum
Great work! Very will designed UI.

Just wondering though, the last release is from September last year. Any specific focus of the activities outside of the core product?

abe94
Hey thanks, no main activities outside of the core product - just forgot to cut a new release on github, we did one today thanks for the reminder!
niyogi
i don't really get this. it's just another competitor to the other players in the market at same price tiers.
ponyous
Wish you had a smaller or free plan for development that supports <100 or maybe even <50 people. 2 weeks are not enough for me to implement and evaluate the product properly. I am not willing to cash out $75/month for something I am not sure will be useful yet.
isaac-sway
Happy Knock customer. Tell me why I should consider Laudspeaker over Knock.
tobilg
Having a look at the docker-compose.yml, I don't really understand why you'd need Mongo, Postgres, Redis and Clickhouse in the same stack... Could you elaborate?