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)<p>Sendwrite is too expensive (obviously has a different target audience). I had to sign up to get prices.<p><pre><code> 1 Card - $2.99
3 Cards - $7.99
10 Cards - $24.99
20 Cards - $39.80</code></pre>
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.
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.<p>With full color printing this becomes even more interesting - direct mailing campaigns become feasible (if expensive) for startups, even with customization.
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.
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: <a href="http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/" rel="nofollow">http://mixergy.com/mailfinch-paul-singh-interview/</a>
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.
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.
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.
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.<p>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.
Check this older thread out, along with comments: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300711" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2300711</a> -- maybe some synergy?
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.