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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

This seems pretty useful, but pricing seems off: $0.005/message works out at $5 for 1000 messages. Which is a lot considering half of these sending methods could otherwise be sent for free using a $5/month server, and it looks like. If we used this for push notifications, this pricing could easily exceed our entire monthly spend on infrastructure and SAAS tools!

Reading the docs, it was also ambiguous to me as to whether I would need to pay the fees from the providers on top of your fees.

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> ambiguous to me as to whether I would need to pay the fees

Sorry, forgot to answer this (but I answered in another comment): you "bring your own" providers so you'd indeed need to pay fees to that provider when applicable.

At one of my jobs we were sending millions of notifications; our Twilio bill was $50-100K / month. At that level you start caring a lot about your cost per message and do everything you can to bring it down. Yeah it's always a hassle and annoying to implement a proper notification system, but the difference is that the extra effort is a one-time implementation cost, not an ongoing one (at least not an ongoing $50K/mo commitment at least).

FWIW we find that most software teams end up significantly rebuilding/refactoring their notification infra every 2-3 years, so it isn't completely a one-time implementation. Not to mention ongoing maintenance, supporting the product/design/marketing teams' change requests, etc.

We do offer lower per-message prices for high-volume customers and are even able to help customers with cost optimization in certain scenarios, e.g. dynamically routing SMS messages to the lowest cost provider depending on the recipient's region (e.g. MessageBird is 15% cheaper than Twilio in Germany).

for most engineering teams the cost of building and maintaining a notification system goes well beyond a $5/month server, though of course it depends on use case and complexity. If you want the ability to render messages across multiple channels from a single template, unified logging across multiple channels, and flexible infrastructure that can scale with demand then you are already talking about a pretty expensive and complex system.

Totally hear you! We offer substantial volume discounts for high-volume senders to make sure we can fit within most teams' budgets. Do you mind if I ask how many messages you're typically sending?

I've sent 10s of thousands of notifications to people on discord which at that rate is hundreds of dollars for a free user. At that price a lot of use cases are eliminated.

10s of the thousands in the same month would indeed move you into our paid plan. If this was more like <10k per month for many months, you'd still be able to do that on our free plan.

I meant that if you were running something like Discord where you have users who over a year make $100s worth of notifications then that use case doesn't match the pricing model compared to a use case where you are dealing with a few users (where one @ doesn't refer to thousands of people)

Ooooh yeah, got it. We have lower per-message prices for customers sending at scale. We have our own hard costs to account for, but we work hard to make sure Courier can fit into most teams' budgets.

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