Nice Idea. How are you going to handle blacklisting (email?). I believe expanding on the interaction part like replies to say something like surveys would greatly increase the value.
I agree. Anything that I can do for free in 5 lines of code or less (email, Twitter) should be sub-one-cent or less. I'd gladly pay for services like phone and SMS, although it seems odd to me that SMS is more expensive than a phone call.
One minute of phone call would probably cost him/her 2.5-3 cents while one SMS will cost him 5 cents. The cost to send/receive SMS will not go down unless you buy hundreds of thousands at the same time.
Depending on your volume, we can work out something. Send us an email info@messagepub.com with estimates of your volume and we'll get in touch with you.
You theoretically could offer snail mail as well - there are services that translate from email to letters for you.
A left field comment -- Right now, this is a developer-orientated service. You could market it to consumers - e.g. This is my messagepub address, send your messages there. Then the consumer as a receiver gets to decide on how messages get routed to them.
A more difficult play, but it would be interesting to see. The revenue part might be more difficult, but perhaps there are ways around this.
It would also have the advantage that applications don't need to know and maintain everything about you (e.g email, phone, cell, twitter, etc, etc). Even in this model it looks like every app is responsible for maintaining all the required info.
The consumer could just maintain it in one place... Sort of like a Grand Central for the Web.
Well, the business upside is that they can work on features instead of debugging a broken browser.
A more esoteric upside would be that a company that speaks out visibly against IE gives me, a technical minded customer, this warm tingly feeling inside. It suggests that someone in the company is like-minded with me. Which in turn suggests that their product and direction might appeal to me, too.
It'd obviously be a different story if this was a product aiming for joe sixpack and the mass-market. But since messaging APIs are a hard sell in the joe-sixpack market in first place I can only applaud their move; focus your resources on the product, not on the latest IE bug.
It's an interesting service but I feel that certain services, for example Twitter, should be free and here's the reason - hook people in free offerings and get them to pay for the other services. Market it in a way that if they don't throw in the paid services to their notification, it just doesn't make sense.
* You're doing things that are (or seem) trivial to do oneself. I'm not convinced this stuff is really hard to do myself, so why would I pay to make it easier? Maybe you can remind me how hard it actually is. There are lots of nasty little problems with these things that memory masks.
* It's not particularly cheap (vs doing it yourself which is effectively free for most delivery methods). Maybe you could compare yourself with other options. Maybe you're better in some ways, so it justifies being more expensive.
* I think a lot of people may only need one or two of the delivery methods. Maybe you can convince me I should be utilizing other delivery mechanisms to reach my users. How would it help me to do so?
What I took from his post was that he was pointing out that DIY is an option for most potential customers of this service. Explaining why this service is a win in the terms you mention such as time/maintenance/ROI for DIY is necessary to convince users to purchase.
Agreed for some things. But in most languages it's one line to send an email, sms, gtalk message etc. I honestly couldn't believe they were trying to charge for email sending or other messages that do not cost money to anyone?
I think the "it is one line of code" needs to be challenged. If you want a reliable, white-listed mail service, it is a whole bunch of upfront and ongoing work with postmasters to deliver a high successful-delivery rate service to your users.
Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. You've raised some great questions.
I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.
You should be convinced after reading our homepage that it is worth your money and maybe the current copy doesn't reflect that well enough. We'll keep iterating on that, gather more data points, analyze it, highlight success stories of integration, etc...
I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.
Don't tell that to us here. Say that in a convincing manner on the homepage.
I agree. I'm soon to be in the market for exactly this kind of service, and seeing email and twitter don't come for free, was an immediate turn off. If I were to use this service (or one like it) I'd be forced to implement email and twitter myself, and just pass through for text messages.
If it connected with Twitter and Email for free, and SMS, phone and even IM were pay to play, I'd be a lot more interested.
I agree. The idea is great, and would save some dev time and learning about various communication streams, but it's not affordable.
Were we to switch to MessagePub just for the e-mails we send from JamLegend for friend requests, challenges, referrals, new songs, etc, our communication costs would increase by 600%. For reference, we use sent.com at a price of $25 for 6 months, which lets us send up to 2K messages/hour. Paying $2500/month would be a vertical hike from $4.16/month. I know your pricing page lists that custom solutions are available for high volume, but I can't imagine that the price would come down enough to be reasonable.
So, I think the idea of one service to hit your users on whatever communication medium they like is cool, but the pricing isn't affordable at scale. Think about it like this: if somebody else had built MessagePub, could you afford to have ShareMeme use it?
It makes more sense for products that don't send a lot of messages, and need to be able to send to all sorts of devices. One example that comes to mind is for server monitoring: if a server is misbehaving, you want to be notified, and if you don't see the first message, the message needs to escalate quickly on multiple mediums, perhaps to other people.
Didn't see this mentioned already, but I really don't like the auto-changing text on the home page. I was in the middle of reading a section when it disappeared and I couldn't figure out how to get it back except to just wait, which I did not do.
Thanks. We've added a mini-menu so that you can control which one of the views you want to see. In addition, once you click on one view, it will stop the auto-changing all together.
Sorry, but not good enough for this particular hater of "dynamic content". If a reader wants the content to stay still, he is not going to think to click on it because clicking usually has the opposite effect: to get something static to change.
And do you have plan for ppl who would like not only to push information but also receive information ?
* EDIT : I saw after posting that it was already possible. Maybe you should do a replace for send by send/receive and also, change the image to have two-way arrows. This way, it would be more obvious.
It's a nice idea. When I play poker, some people prefer to be contacted by email and some by text message, so I can see a use for this.
Some suggestions I would make:
1. drop the charges for sending emails and other forms of communication that don't cost anything, at least for people who make a small number every month. This will help build your user base and encourage open-source applications/libraries around your product
2. include UK SMS and phone messaging; the service is useless to me without it
3. I note you also have sharememe, an "intelligent outbox"; this needs to be more tightly linked with messagepub. How about an "intelligent inbox" too?
I think your pricing model is not good at all. It's expensive, there is no level service, and you are using a 'credit' system instead of simply pricing in known currencies.
Also, how are you going to contact users on IM services? Don't the users have to add you as a friend first?
I'd echo the other comments about pricing. It seems quite expensive given what you are providing.
For example, I looked up the Google App Engine pricing for sending emails and it's $0.0001 for each email.
Additionally, it's unclear to me how your system handles things like bad emails, twitter being down, etc. From a custom standpoint, handling the messaging exceptions is nearly as important as actually sending the messages.
I was just looking for an easy way to set up my website monitoring to call me when it's down. This may be it. It does seem a little expensive though, and I don't like credit systems, they just seem slimey for some reason.
With a bit of curl hacking I managed to abuse their demo API to send arbitrary messages.
Just try this :
curl -v -d "channel=email&address=EMAIL_HERE&commit=Submit&message=messagepub%20sucks%20I%20JustHackedTheirDemoAPItoSendArbitraryMessagesUsingCURLlolSpam&authenticity_token=1f52274baf9904dd33b012c1a4c1548afd197438" -b _trunk_session=BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlM2JmZDg3ZDhlYTZjN2U3MzFkNmMyMWMyNGYxYmQ4YTQiCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA%3D--2e9b47678c68095440f03ce3b7558712b4fba37a http://messagepub.com/demo/create
You'll have to grab the cookie and authenticity_token from a preceding GET request, as the cookie seems to change from time to time. The authenticity token does not change among successive posts.
Though if you really want to brag effectively about finding an exploit here, you should probably just shoot an e-mail to the developers first and then, if you feel the need, mention publicly that you found something.
That way you look more like a white hat and less like a script kiddie or a troll.
FYI. This is no longer an issue. It was fixed even before ovi256 posted this comment which is why in the original post, he mentioned that the server was down. That's because his IP address had been blocked and a fix was deployed.
He later edited the comment to remove the part where he said that the site was down...
I got your email, too bad you decided to go this route rather than emailing me about it first. It's all good though. No hard feelings.
Glad you fixed it so fast and sorry about being an asshole earlier. It's a bit of social engineering : it gets things going - if you hate me and/or the disclosure you are more likely to fix the hole. Stupid, I know, but it works.
I confirm that in my initial post, I wrongly assumed the demo page was down. Downforeverythingorjustme.com confirmed afterwards that my IP was blocked - luccastera moved incredibly fast! And right now, the canned messages seem to be whitelisted, which fixed the problem for good.
65 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] threadhow does pricing scale with volume?
The video is a nice intro for devs. You might consider preceding it with a less technical 'overview' video that shows your service in action.
You theoretically could offer snail mail as well - there are services that translate from email to letters for you.
A left field comment -- Right now, this is a developer-orientated service. You could market it to consumers - e.g. This is my messagepub address, send your messages there. Then the consumer as a receiver gets to decide on how messages get routed to them.
A more difficult play, but it would be interesting to see. The revenue part might be more difficult, but perhaps there are ways around this.
It would also have the advantage that applications don't need to know and maintain everything about you (e.g email, phone, cell, twitter, etc, etc). Even in this model it looks like every app is responsible for maintaining all the required info.
The consumer could just maintain it in one place... Sort of like a Grand Central for the Web.
We built messagepub after a lot of ShareMeme users asked us for an API.
Very excited by the prospect of controlling my communication flow.
Stupid move. If it's irrelevant to the business they should take it down. Only has the potential to turn away customers with no upside.
A more esoteric upside would be that a company that speaks out visibly against IE gives me, a technical minded customer, this warm tingly feeling inside. It suggests that someone in the company is like-minded with me. Which in turn suggests that their product and direction might appeal to me, too.
It'd obviously be a different story if this was a product aiming for joe sixpack and the mass-market. But since messaging APIs are a hard sell in the joe-sixpack market in first place I can only applaud their move; focus your resources on the product, not on the latest IE bug.
Is this sentence missing "message" after send?
BTW, I love the logo!
* It's not particularly cheap (vs doing it yourself which is effectively free for most delivery methods). Maybe you could compare yourself with other options. Maybe you're better in some ways, so it justifies being more expensive.
* I think a lot of people may only need one or two of the delivery methods. Maybe you can convince me I should be utilizing other delivery mechanisms to reach my users. How would it help me to do so?
Are you saying that DIY is a clear win in terms of those costs as well?
Best of luck to them, but pass.
And that's just one example.
I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.
You should be convinced after reading our homepage that it is worth your money and maybe the current copy doesn't reflect that well enough. We'll keep iterating on that, gather more data points, analyze it, highlight success stories of integration, etc...
Thx for your suggestions.
Don't tell that to us here. Say that in a convincing manner on the homepage.
If it connected with Twitter and Email for free, and SMS, phone and even IM were pay to play, I'd be a lot more interested.
Were we to switch to MessagePub just for the e-mails we send from JamLegend for friend requests, challenges, referrals, new songs, etc, our communication costs would increase by 600%. For reference, we use sent.com at a price of $25 for 6 months, which lets us send up to 2K messages/hour. Paying $2500/month would be a vertical hike from $4.16/month. I know your pricing page lists that custom solutions are available for high volume, but I can't imagine that the price would come down enough to be reasonable.
So, I think the idea of one service to hit your users on whatever communication medium they like is cool, but the pricing isn't affordable at scale. Think about it like this: if somebody else had built MessagePub, could you afford to have ShareMeme use it?
It makes more sense for products that don't send a lot of messages, and need to be able to send to all sorts of devices. One example that comes to mind is for server monitoring: if a server is misbehaving, you want to be notified, and if you don't see the first message, the message needs to escalate quickly on multiple mediums, perhaps to other people.
For things without a fixed cost you should be charging pence for 1000s of results not 1s.
For phone and txt you have fixed costs and that's obvious, but I would reprice with everything except the phone and text at the same prices for CPM.
* EDIT : I saw after posting that it was already possible. Maybe you should do a replace for send by send/receive and also, change the image to have two-way arrows. This way, it would be more obvious.
Some suggestions I would make:
1. drop the charges for sending emails and other forms of communication that don't cost anything, at least for people who make a small number every month. This will help build your user base and encourage open-source applications/libraries around your product
2. include UK SMS and phone messaging; the service is useless to me without it
3. I note you also have sharememe, an "intelligent outbox"; this needs to be more tightly linked with messagepub. How about an "intelligent inbox" too?
We use it and it's awesome. Pricing isn't too bad either.
Also, how are you going to contact users on IM services? Don't the users have to add you as a friend first?
For example, I looked up the Google App Engine pricing for sending emails and it's $0.0001 for each email.
Additionally, it's unclear to me how your system handles things like bad emails, twitter being down, etc. From a custom standpoint, handling the messaging exceptions is nearly as important as actually sending the messages.
Just try this : curl -v -d "channel=email&address=EMAIL_HERE&commit=Submit&message=messagepub%20sucks%20I%20JustHackedTheirDemoAPItoSendArbitraryMessagesUsingCURLlolSpam&authenticity_token=1f52274baf9904dd33b012c1a4c1548afd197438" -b _trunk_session=BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlM2JmZDg3ZDhlYTZjN2U3MzFkNmMyMWMyNGYxYmQ4YTQiCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA%3D--2e9b47678c68095440f03ce3b7558712b4fba37a http://messagepub.com/demo/create
You'll have to grab the cookie and authenticity_token from a preceding GET request, as the cookie seems to change from time to time. The authenticity token does not change among successive posts.
Hello spam!
Guys, please fix your security.
This will not stop abuse of your canned messages, but at least messagepost's demo page will not become a spam gateway.
Though if you really want to brag effectively about finding an exploit here, you should probably just shoot an e-mail to the developers first and then, if you feel the need, mention publicly that you found something.
That way you look more like a white hat and less like a script kiddie or a troll.
Ok, it was a 5 min exploit, but I still lolled for most of the evening.
He later edited the comment to remove the part where he said that the site was down...
I got your email, too bad you decided to go this route rather than emailing me about it first. It's all good though. No hard feelings.
I confirm that in my initial post, I wrongly assumed the demo page was down. Downforeverythingorjustme.com confirmed afterwards that my IP was blocked - luccastera moved incredibly fast! And right now, the canned messages seem to be whitelisted, which fixed the problem for good.