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Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#81

Post by christiangenco »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #75

The moat for SaaS is gone. I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations. I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage. I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

Perhaps you could, but you probably always could've built a clone of any SaaS app you wanted, it's just become faster.

I'm reminded of the infamous Dropbox Hacker News comment[1]. If you're looking at stuff like this thinking "what's the point? I could just make that myself" then you're not the target audience in the same sort of way Ikea isn't trying to sell stuff to carpenters.

This is true even when the barrier to entry in making these sorts of systems has gotten way lower.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#82

Post by suriya-ganesh »

Interesting take, but this feels like one of those tarpit ideas that YC discourages their portco to start attacking.

Guaranteed this is going to attract a ton of abusers who are looking to use this for signing up to services, spamming or other nefarious purposes, which then blacklists the doman. This is an infinite whack-a-mole.

do you guys have some ways of handling it?

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#83

Post by VWWHFSfQ »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #75

The moat for SaaS is gone. I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations. I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage. I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

> The moat for SaaS is gone.

What does this even mean?

I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#85

Post by iamacyborg »

trollbridge wrote: post #59
throw03172019 wrote: post #2

The 2FA via email case is great. I recently had to build a browser automation workflow that required 2FA. I ended up using Zapier to monitor email inbox and then extract the code and send back to our API. It was a bit slow.

... you had to use Zapier to extract an email from an inbox?

Google API scopes for email are pretty restrictive, which is generally a good thing from a security perspective.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#86

Post by jacobr1 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #83
pizzafeelsright wrote: post #75

The moat for SaaS is gone. I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations. I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage. I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

> The moat for SaaS is gone. What does this even mean? I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.

All the hard work is always chasing down edge cases, scaling, operational issues and other things that don't show up the user-exposed features. And talking about features, the innovation in coming up with them, or iterating on making them work with real customer experience is a ton of value, even if copying the ideas that work later is much easier - which is why I generally prefer betting on an innovator with just of enough traction to show they can stick with it. The best category leaders both innovate and steal/copy/buy all the innovation they aren't producing in house to maintain their lead.

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#87

Post by vimda »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #83
pizzafeelsright wrote: post #75

The moat for SaaS is gone. I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations. I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage. I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

> The moat for SaaS is gone. What does this even mean? I could spend $1,000s on tokens asking an agent to build (some semblance of) Sentry, or New Relic, but why would I bother? I have real work to do in the near-term, and I'm happy to pay for services that help me do it.

It's a bit vague, but the idea is right. If your SaaS is built with AI, then any customer you have can also build it with AI, and whatever they build is going to be better suited to their needs and will run cheaper because they aren't paying your margin. AI skews the build vs buy curve massively, because it makes building so much easier

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#88

Post by jacobr1 »

trollbridge wrote: post #56
Haakam21 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This refers to B2B use cases that are live in production. Finding, contacting, and negotiating with vendors is a tedious process in many industries. In the time a human reaches out to 10 vendors, an agent reaches out to 100 or 1000. So it finds deals that a human would not have.

Once vendors are getting AI spam sent to 1,000 of them and their competitors, they will stop responding and find other sales channels. This won't be sustainable.

Unless they have agents reading those emails and responding ...

Re: Launch HN: AgentMail (YC S25) – An API that gives agents their own email inboxes

#89

Post by baxtr »

pizzafeelsright wrote: post #75

The moat for SaaS is gone. I am 99% certain I could build to parity in a weekend using Cloudflare without the the pricing limitations. I am thinking it would be within the free tier of CF usage. I am not certain I have the bandwidth to communicate over delivery and plain text inspection concerns.

The moat around TV shows feels gone with TikTok/YT.

I am 99% certain I could reach parity in a weekend by publishing content on public networks, without the old distribution or pricing constraints.

I think it would all run on infrastructure that is effectively free to use.

I am not certain I have the bandwidth to handle distribution, sustained attention, and moderation once the content starts flowing.

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