This looks absolutely fantastic! Does anyone else feel like Show HNs with straightforward, by-the-order pricing is always based on declining technology (Fax; SMS; Printing in the case of Bingo Card Creator)? I guess it has to do with the customer base?
It's the predictable margin between cost to provide service and the value of convenience to the customers.
The marginal cost of sending a fax is, arguably, about one cent. (1.8c/min VOIP cost, 30 seconds to send, some electricity). Most faxes will be one page anyway, so the profit margin is a nice 10000%.
Finding a working fax machine if you don't have one sitting around all set up is a hassle on the order of 10 minutes to an hour, and likely to end up with a visit to a UPS/FedEx/Staples or the equivalent thereof, where they will charge you $1.50-$2 for the first page anyway.
Find a cheap old technology that people want to use infrequently and are therefore willing to pay a relatively large markup for convenience. Let's see... appointmentreminder already does voice calls for reminders, but how about automated, customized calls? Get a good speech synthesis app and let people send and schedule calls that read out whatever they want to type. That's probably worth a buck to people who only want to do it once, and then you can offer a subscription rate for frequent flyers.
EDIT: there’s definitely something to this thesis. In the case of faxes, they are an interface to older entities (government agencies and some businesses) and the unit cost for any individual to find a fax machine is relatively high. In addition, many fax services are venture funded and require subscriptions, when that isn’t really what many individuals need.
Cool! I use one of your competitors, Fax Fresh. One thing I like about them is that they clearly state they delete the fax from their servers once it's sent. I couldn't find such a statement in your privacy policy (though maybe I missed it). Can you elaborate on what happens to my fax after it's sent? Is it deleted from your server?
Ah, we do delete the file as soon as the fax is confirmed as delivered: its in our FAQ at https://www.faxrocket.com/faq.html. We will update the privacy policy to include a reference to that.
How does your company manage to use Stripe and Paypal for microtransactions with their fees? Do you get a special discount? 25 cents - minus fees means there's barely any left.
Paypal offers a separate fee structure for micropayments:
PayPal's micropayments price is 5% + $.05 and is designed for merchants who process low-value transactions (typically under $10 in value). The micropayments rate is available to all merchants and in all countries where Business accounts are available. If you sign up for micropayments, you will be charged the micropayments rate on all transactions regardless of payment size.
I'm not sure about the answer to your question about different fees for microtransactions, but with their pricing, you would never get charged 25 cents. The minimum charge is $1.
The first four pages are $1, which I'm assuming is partly to cover that issue of their charge getting eaten up by payment fees.
> J2 Global operates numerous, nearly identical websites such as eFax.com, RapidFax.com, MyFax.com, MetroFax.com, SmartFax.com and Fax.com that all offer the same internet fax services. As a result, J2 effectively controls over 90% of the internet fax market.
> ... the methodology of litigation that J2 employs has allowed for them to sue any competitors for infringing on a patent held by J2 over all faxes using an email, regardless of whether they are using PHP, SMTP or .NET gateways in the emails.
I was asked to look for an online fax solution. A provider I contacted never called me back. Do you offer subscriptions even if they are not needed? I know next to nothing about faxing - how is the transmitted data secured? Is it?
>I know next to nothing about faxing - how is the transmitted data secured? Is it?
Traditionally, transmitting a fax was just making a telephone call so it was vulnerable in the same way that any telephone call was to wiretapping. With fax services as exist today, you're basically emailing them a PDF and they're then sending that as a fax to someone's phone number. (Or the reverse.) So there's no real security other than that provided by the telephone network and the service's internal controls.
I had efax for a number of years but I believe they eliminated the free incoming fax number for free accounts and I haven't actually needed to send or receive an actual fax (as opposed to a scanned document) in years.
So, if you send 1 short fax/week (@ $1 for 1-4 pages), your breakeven point just buying a fax machine ($30-50 for entry level on Amazon, new) is less than a year?
I work for a business that could use a low-volume faxing service, but the price needs to come down an order of magnitude.
The lack of subscription and signup, combined with the pricing, suggest that this is aiming at people who almost never send a fax, and would spend significantly more buying and maintaining a fax machine, compared to a couple dollars on this service.
I do hope you find a service that fits your need, but this is very likely not intending to be it.
Right, but is it a viable business if the average customer spends $1-2/year or less?
A business phone line ($100/month or less -- crap tier VOIP lines work fine for faxes) and a PCI fax/modem (<$50) should let you send hundreds of pages an hour with no paper or other consumables. It certainly seems like a send-only service that charges $0.01/page is more than viable. Even averaging only a page a minute would be $15/day in revenue, a huge profit margin.
Hey, thanks. Twilio actually does do faxes, but this was built prior to Twilio dipping their toes into the fax waters. We use Phaxio (https://www.phaxio.com/): the API is nice and clean and we've had an entirely happy time working with it.
Our goal is to provide devs that have mission-critical applications with the most reliable and redundant faxing capabilities. (If you've dealt with faxing, you know it's annoyingly finicky.)
Re: We're fans of Twilio, but our approach to solving this problem is significantly different.
(I'm answering the second question above, not necessarily the first)
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The marginal cost of sending a fax is, arguably, about one cent. (1.8c/min VOIP cost, 30 seconds to send, some electricity). Most faxes will be one page anyway, so the profit margin is a nice 10000%.
Finding a working fax machine if you don't have one sitting around all set up is a hassle on the order of 10 minutes to an hour, and likely to end up with a visit to a UPS/FedEx/Staples or the equivalent thereof, where they will charge you $1.50-$2 for the first page anyway.
Find a cheap old technology that people want to use infrequently and are therefore willing to pay a relatively large markup for convenience. Let's see... appointmentreminder already does voice calls for reminders, but how about automated, customized calls? Get a good speech synthesis app and let people send and schedule calls that read out whatever they want to type. That's probably worth a buck to people who only want to do it once, and then you can offer a subscription rate for frequent flyers.
EDIT: there’s definitely something to this thesis. In the case of faxes, they are an interface to older entities (government agencies and some businesses) and the unit cost for any individual to find a fax machine is relatively high. In addition, many fax services are venture funded and require subscriptions, when that isn’t really what many individuals need.
PayPal's micropayments price is 5% + $.05 and is designed for merchants who process low-value transactions (typically under $10 in value). The micropayments rate is available to all merchants and in all countries where Business accounts are available. If you sign up for micropayments, you will be charged the micropayments rate on all transactions regardless of payment size.
From PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/us/selfhelp/article/what-are-micropay...
The first four pages are $1, which I'm assuming is partly to cover that issue of their charge getting eaten up by payment fees.
The top payment processors all have a fixed component to their fees - we just absorb it into our pricing structure.
Do you have your J2 situation sorted out yet? They're suit-happy.
> J2 Global operates numerous, nearly identical websites such as eFax.com, RapidFax.com, MyFax.com, MetroFax.com, SmartFax.com and Fax.com that all offer the same internet fax services. As a result, J2 effectively controls over 90% of the internet fax market.
> ... the methodology of litigation that J2 employs has allowed for them to sue any competitors for infringing on a patent held by J2 over all faxes using an email, regardless of whether they are using PHP, SMTP or .NET gateways in the emails.
Source: Used to work for, then own a fax brand many years ago.
Out of curiosity what’s your use case? There are lots of subscription fax services out there (efax and hellofax are 2 popular ones)
Traditionally, transmitting a fax was just making a telephone call so it was vulnerable in the same way that any telephone call was to wiretapping. With fax services as exist today, you're basically emailing them a PDF and they're then sending that as a fax to someone's phone number. (Or the reverse.) So there's no real security other than that provided by the telephone network and the service's internal controls.
I had efax for a number of years but I believe they eliminated the free incoming fax number for free accounts and I haven't actually needed to send or receive an actual fax (as opposed to a scanned document) in years.
I work for a business that could use a low-volume faxing service, but the price needs to come down an order of magnitude.
I do hope you find a service that fits your need, but this is very likely not intending to be it.
A business phone line ($100/month or less -- crap tier VOIP lines work fine for faxes) and a PCI fax/modem (<$50) should let you send hundreds of pages an hour with no paper or other consumables. It certainly seems like a send-only service that charges $0.01/page is more than viable. Even averaging only a page a minute would be $15/day in revenue, a huge profit margin.
I don’t care how much you can buy one for, I’d pay a premium to not have to have one or set it up.
Dead Comment
Had a similar idea/pain point and I built a similar tool for sending postal mail - http://simplepostal.com/
Our goal is to provide devs that have mission-critical applications with the most reliable and redundant faxing capabilities. (If you've dealt with faxing, you know it's annoyingly finicky.)
Re: We're fans of Twilio, but our approach to solving this problem is significantly different.
(I'm answering the second question above, not necessarily the first)
edit: I guess I was answering both :)
Edit: I guess the phone number makes faxrocket a better deal for low usage, but phaxio becomes much cheaper quickly.
https://www.twilio.com/fax