Lob (YC S13) Debuts a Cloud Printing and Shipping Service for Developers

I don&#x27;t have much domain knowledge, but the pricing seems rather high:<p><a href="https://www.lob.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.lob.com&#x2F;pricing</a><p>$.45 for a black and white piece of paper is on the high end, especially considering they&#x27;re acting as a middleman.

I use AmazingMail&#x27;s API and they have been great:<p><a href="http://www.amazingmail.com/direct-mail-automation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazingmail.com&#x2F;direct-mail-automation</a><p>Pricing is much cheaper. Main downside is there is a rather sizable one-time setup fee. But for printing, you are going to need to work with support to ensure things are working well, so this support is what you are paying for.

Feedback on the website: There is currently no Terms of Service. There is a Privacy Policy posted, but the TOS is not there. Your PP says, &quot;This Privacy Policy is governed by our Terms of Service&quot;, so I would post one immediately.

Does anyone know where I could find a list of API&#x27;s as a product?<p>examples that I can think of:<p>Stripe<p>Lob<p>EligibleAPI<p>Factual

This is a great idea. I have a tight relationship with the printer I use at <a href="http://www.cheergram.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cheergram.com</a> and we are thinking of doing something similar.<p>I know several pro print labs and Lob&#x27;s prices are a bit high. On the other hand, small run printing can be a pain. Most printers I know have minimum orders on photo prints and press products like cards have to be done in groups of 25 or 100. Also, most printers will ship to their client for free but charge a fee to drop-ship.<p>All-in-all, the pricing isn&#x27;t terrible but you have to find some kind of specialty&#x2F;niche to make it work. I don&#x27;t think you could do much with just a basic &quot;print this thing&quot; service built on top of this.<p>Here&#x27;s one lab I know of that actually publishes their pricing: <a href="http://www.nationsphotolab.com/prints.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nationsphotolab.com&#x2F;prints.aspx</a>

So this is similar to <a href="http://theprintful.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theprintful.com</a> ?<p>I can&#x27;t make sense of the pricing page, is the cost for shipping included in the &quot;packaging&quot;-price?<p>Do you ship worldwide?<p>How long does it take until my order is in my customers mailbox?

What&#x27;s the use case for this? I guess it&#x27;d be more useful the deeper you get into their pricing structure such as with photos or business cards; but it doesn&#x27;t seem like its priced all that competitively with established services.<p>If this were a price-attractive campaign mailing tool...well then we&#x27;re in a whole different ballgame. I could see Scrooge McDuck vaults of money being made in disrupting the last true bastion of postal mailing services.

for what it&#x27;s worth I&#x27;ve tried this service about 3 weeks ago. I printed a sample postcard to test the quality. It was better than I expected, especially coming from a pdf. At the time there was no way to print a two sided job (it&#x27;s probably supported now), but they accommodated my request and gave me a ton of paper options that weren&#x27;t available through the api.<p>Long story short, awesome customer experience and quality result.

I used these guys for some fliers the other day and they were actually really beautiful. Very approachable and great customer service. I highly recommend them!

Offtopic... but I&#x27;d love to hear the story of how they acquired a 3-letter domain. That seems like quite a feat for a young startup.

This looks like a good service. We currently use Pwinty (www.pwinty.com) which is operating in the same space. They are very good and we are very happy with the service. If you think Lob is a good fit for your app do take a look at Pwinty too, they have been running for about a year and have fulfilment centres in both the us and uk.

Anyone knows the shipping &amp; postage cost for their services? I couldn&#x27;t find any details on their page.

I signed up for this last weekend, and had great followups with Harry Zhang, one of the co-founders. Super impressed with the customer service &#x2F; support.

I have been watching this since launch, I think it is a great concept. Really looking forward to seeing it develop.

very simple to use. i was in charge of developing their PHP client: <a href="https://github.com/lob/lob-php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lob&#x2F;lob-php</a><p>and already thinking into something that could use lob&#x27;s potential. :)

Very impressive URL.<p>I assume one of the founders already owned it?

Where is the pricing for stickers?

Go Blue!