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Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

approveapi.com

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Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#21

Post by crsv »

anitil wrote: post #18
davedx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations. I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a millio…

It's a crazy calculation. For mass marketing it'd be outrageous. But for mission-critical business flows? It's a rounding error.

Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#22

Post by chii »

crsv wrote: post #21
anitil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a crazy calculation. For mass marketing it'd be outrageous. But for mission-critical business flows? It's a rounding error.

Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.

Let's say there's a need to approve 10 things a week, each needing a 5 person approvals.

That's $2 per month of cost.

A developer costs $150k a year, and if it takes a month to develop, you could have the service for some 5000 months.

In-house developers should focus on the business domain, not on custom building business processes.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#23

Post by [deleted] »

davedx wrote: post #13
chaosprophet wrote: post #5

Wow, $1 for 100 emails is very very very very expensive. So expensive that I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money. It's a pretty solid idea otherwise.

> I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations. I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a millio…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#24

Post by crsv »

chii wrote: post #22
crsv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.

Let's say there's a need to approve 10 things a week, each needing a 5 person approvals. That's $2 per month of cost. A developer costs $150k a year, and if it takes a month to develop, you could have the service for some 5000 months. In-house developers should focus on the business domain, not on custom building business processes.

No one does this “approve 10 things a week with a 5 person approval” flow that isn’t already done in some organized platform or system. Where on earth is this use case happening that this is both a valid use case and a savvy enough customer to buy this solution? This is not a thing.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#25

Post by james_s_tayler »

braindumps wrote: post #2

This is neat but I wonder if companies would just build this themselves instead?

They might do, but they also might opt not to if this solution exists?

Or they just don't build it and approve things not via an API. There may be a lot of processes out there that could benefit from something like this.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#26

Post by Aeolun »

crsv wrote: post #21
anitil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a crazy calculation. For mass marketing it'd be outrageous. But for mission-critical business flows? It's a rounding error.

Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.

This will not be built in house at a fraction of the cost. In fact, it will be a massive, _massive_ waste of time.

But it is part of a business critical flow, and therefore handing it over to a third party is absolutely unthinkable.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#27

Post by dsl »

chii wrote: post #22
crsv wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.

Let's say there's a need to approve 10 things a week, each needing a 5 person approvals. That's $2 per month of cost. A developer costs $150k a year, and if it takes a month to develop, you could have the service for some 5000 months. In-house developers should focus on the business domain, not on custom building business processes.

Go talk to your vendor management team about getting a $2/mo contract signed. What does support look like because if this goes down at 2 AM, business is impacted.

Legal needs to review because it is sending employee PII (emails, phone numbers, etc) to a third party, who now knows the individuals in critical "approval roles".

Next hit up security and have them do an audit since this is going to be part of a security control. For bonus points, the internal pentest team finds a bypass that ApproveAPI needs to fix.

Your $150k a year developer is now spending 3-5 hours a week for 3 weeks shepherding a vendor onboarding for something they could have built and tested in a few hours.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#28

Post by dsl »

agrinman wrote: post #14
chaosprophet wrote: post #5

Wow, $1 for 100 emails is very very very very expensive. So expensive that I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money. It's a pretty solid idea otherwise.

Hey -- one of the creators here, thanks for your comment. We definitely don't want to price out companies from using our service so we are listening carefully. I also want to mention that we do support volume pricing, so if you want to send lots of approvals per month we can work together on a price that makes sense for your use case -- just reach out to us at support@approveapi.com.

You are clearly baking in your Twilio/Mailgun costs in to the per-approval price. Why not just let me provide an API key and charge $5/mo for the service itself?

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#29

Post by Aeolun »

agrinman wrote: post #14
chaosprophet wrote: post #5

Wow, $1 for 100 emails is very very very very expensive. So expensive that I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money. It's a pretty solid idea otherwise.

Hey -- one of the creators here, thanks for your comment. We definitely don't want to price out companies from using our service so we are listening carefully. I also want to mention that we do support volume pricing, so if you want to send lots of approvals per month we can work together on a price that makes sense for your use case -- just reach out to us at support@approveapi.com.

On average, a boring approval wastes maybe 1 minute between the requester waiting and the approver opening whatever system they use for approval. Over 100 approvals, this is 100 minutes wasted.

At $100 per hour for a professional, you could save around $159 by using this service.

Seems like the pricing works out to me. You just have to figure out how much time is wasted in traditional approval and how much time this approval method saves the customers.

Re: Show HN: ApproveAPI – Real-Time user approvals via email, SMS, and push

#30

Post by filoleg »

sshmania wrote: post #3

Interesting that you can use this for two-man rule...especially since this api is real-time. I'm having trouble thinking of scenario where I would use this feature at my company, but cool nonetheless

You just have to think of it as a sign-off rather than an approval, and you can quickly come up with many use cases for it.

For example, imagine that you are responsible for rolling the build this week, and you need to get a sign off from an assigned person on each sister team, confirming that they tested their feature area before you push the trigger and roll the build. You can either email and try to contact each person individually, but the cleanest way to solve this issue would be to create a multi-person approval, where you can track the status of a sign off for each sister team in real time. Approval serves as an affirmation in this scenario.

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