Yes, especially if you have account-level usage that isn't just a rollup of user usage, e.g. API usage that isn't tied to a user, but to an account that multiple users are members of.
This is really clever. There are definitely huge gaps with existing product analytics tools once you veer away from their primary ICP – just ask any B2B PLG company about account-level analytics...
Great article. All of this complexity is the reason I started Courier (YC S19) [0], which we just launched on HN [1] a few days ago. :-)
We take the approach of essentially offering an abstraction layer that lets you route to one or more channels based on data related to the notification event instead of having to hardcode the integration at the callsite. This has the added benefit of also letting you pull the template abstraction into the same space (so you don't go crazy manually maintaining HTML templates for email, plain text for SMS, BlockKit for Slack, etc. etc.)
FYI we support integrations for nearly all of the channels mentioned here: email (via SMTP, SendGrid, SES, and others), Discord, SMS (via Twilio and others), web push, WhatsApp (via Twilio WhatsApp), Slack, & PagerDuty. And many others...
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.
I was surprised nobody else pointed this out! No, no pivot. Two main reasons:
1. It took a lot of time to build something robust enough that teams were willing to swap out their critical infrastructure for. There is a big different between your marketing automation system experiencing an issue vs. the system that sends out 2FA/magic link messages.
2. I really wanted to iterate on our API until it felt "HN worthy." That also took time. (For reference, Stripe did their HN launch a couple years post-YC for the same reason.)
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.
George & the OneSignal team are great. We integrate with OneSignal (both their mobile push and email services). We integrate with more channels than using OneSignal directly (say you wanted to integrate with Slack or WhatsApp) and offer things like dynamic routing between channels & providers that OneSignal doesn't.
(And yes, YC definitely does bet on competitive companies in the same space!)
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).
I live in SF and it is not at all clear to me how expanding access to guns would either help or hurt the homelessness challenges in the city.