[HN Gopher] Show HN: Laudspeaker - Open-source mobile push, SMS ...
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       Show HN: Laudspeaker - Open-source mobile push, SMS and email
       automation
        
       Hey HN, we are sharing again, after a year of updates!  Laudspeaker
       (https://laudspeaker.com/) is an open source customer engagement
       suite (also called marketing automation software). If you've used
       tools like Braze, One Signal, Airship, Iterable, Customer.io or
       some others, Laudspeaker is an alternative to these. Here is a
       quick demo:
       https://www.loom.com/share/4b309390ee274ea491981e1394e9abc4. And
       here is a link to sign up and try free (no cc needed):
       https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup.  Or if you prefer to just jump
       in, go to https://app.laudspeaker.com/login and use this test
       account:                 email: test94@laudspeaker.com       pw:
       test93@laudspeaker.com       The main things Laudspeaker lets you
       do are:  1. Define 'segments': which of your users should receive
       messages.  2. Define 'messaging journeys': when, where and with
       which channels you want to reach users. Right now we support push,
       email, SMS, and soon we'll also include in-app messages and
       WhatsApp.  For example, one customer of ours runs a journey like
       this: "Wait for a user to complete onboarding on our mobile app,
       then send a welcome push. If they complete an action the next day
       on the app, stop sending messages, otherwise send a followup
       email."  There are quite a few big updates since our last Show HN
       (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34835559):  We now have a
       mobile SDK for sending and receiving push notifications. We have
       revamped the journey builder, and made our segment builder much
       more comprehensive. Our application is also a lot more battle
       tested - we are deployed with a major fintech in Asia and are
       sending XX million messages a week to more than x million users.
       We've seen a lot of demand from consumer focused apps and websites
       who find most of the existing solutions' pricing models
       prohibitively expensive so please reach out if that sounds like
       you. We have successfully migrated people over from Braze, customer
       io and others.  If you're interested in the mobile SdK, see our
       tutorial: https://laudspeaker.com/docs/getting-started/setting-up-
       mobi...,  and sample apps: https://github.com/laudspeaker/android-
       sample-app, https://github.com/laudspeaker/ios-sample-app.  Our
       Github is https://github.com/laudspeaker/laudspeaker. Try it out
       for free at https://app.laudspeaker.com/signup.  We'd love to hear
       your feedback and comments!
        
       Author : abe94
       Score  : 104 points
       Date   : 2024-06-05 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | navigate8310 wrote:
       | How is this comparable to Chatwoot, except the WABA integration?
        
         | abe94 wrote:
         | Hey great question, a lot of services present themselves under
         | the customer engagement banner so it can be hard to
         | differentiate!
         | 
         | Chatwoot is a great tool, but is more in the customer support
         | space. It offers a chat widget in your saas app / website and a
         | shared interface to respond, which can then get routed via
         | email, sms etc to the person who asked the question.
         | 
         | Laudspeaker is more of tool to send 1) one off messages
         | (informational, promotional) to segments of users you define,
         | 2) automate message sends like a drip campaign, 3) trigger
         | automatic real-time messages based on specific activity users
         | take in your app or site, eg on add to cart, or on sign up
         | 
         | The users of chatwoot would be customer support / success, the
         | users of Laudspeaker would be growth, marketing, product
         | 
         | The architecture of both applications are quite different.
         | Laudspeaker needs to be able to quickly message millions of
         | users, ingest real time events, and create references to large
         | sets (millions) of users.
         | 
         | We actually used chatwoot for support a while back, and have a
         | customer who uses both Laudspeaker and chatwoot in production!
        
       | p2hari wrote:
       | I do not understand the pricing or maybe the license. On the
       | website it shows self hosting only under enterprise plan. What
       | does it mean. Can I not self host it if I am not an enterprise?
        
         | abe94 wrote:
         | Hey yes you can self-host for free. our small team just can't
         | provide support for free users.
         | 
         | We offer enterprise level support for self-hosting users in the
         | paid plan, and they can use future features in our ee
         | (enterprise) folder (which is empty right now)
        
           | alt227 wrote:
           | I really like the 'free to use, pay for support' model.
           | 
           | Well done and good luck!
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | Would be great name for a device that just sang your praises all
       | day.
        
       | tombert wrote:
       | Forgive a bit of ignorance on this, but it seems cool and I want
       | some clarifying questions.
       | 
       | If I want to send SMS to a bunch of people, can I hook this into
       | a self-hosted Asterisk server or something? Or does this have its
       | own SMS gateway? Or am I forced to use a third party dealio like
       | Twilio?
        
         | mcharawi wrote:
         | We have support for twilio natively since that's one of the
         | popular options, but we also support webhooks as a channel, so
         | if your Asterisk server has an HTTP endpoint that can trigger
         | messages it would be compatible.
        
         | lxgr wrote:
         | Maybe I misunderstand, but how would you send SMS via an
         | Asterisk server? Wouldn't you need an SMS gateway in the end
         | anyway?
        
           | tombert wrote:
           | Yes, sorry, you would need some kind of TCP gateway or a SIM
           | card.
        
       | ksajadi wrote:
       | Kudos on making this, especially after the huge price hike
       | Customer.io just dropped on their customers.
        
         | abe94 wrote:
         | Thanks yes - we've seen quite a few inbound customers to our
         | SaaS as a result of this!
         | 
         | We are trying to find a pricing model that can work for
         | consumer facing apps/sites and companies, as well as B2B!
        
       | memset wrote:
       | Awesome! What's the process for self-hosting?
        
         | mcharawi wrote:
         | If you're interested in an enterprise plan, we help you set up
         | and scale self-hosting as part of the support contract for as
         | long as you need. We have one-click infra-as-code to get you
         | set up on multiple cloud providers with minimal devops
         | intervention.
         | 
         | If you want to self host for free, the easiest way would be to
         | run our docker compose on a compute instance-we're in the
         | process of updating our docs for self hosting and I can email
         | you with more info if you'd like.
        
       | ssijak wrote:
       | I dont understand your point that you are cheaper then others and
       | work for b2c when pricing is very similar to other similar
       | services.
        
       | mvkel wrote:
       | Open sourcing something like this feels like marketing more than
       | anything else.
       | 
       | They suffer from the same "cold start" problem that social apps
       | do. For the project to thrive, there needs to be an existing
       | fanbase to improve and support it.
       | 
       | Is what makes Wordpress great the fact that it's open source? No.
       | It's the community of builders that surround it.
       | 
       | Would anyone realistically be willing to spin this stack up in
       | their existing company (and sign up for maintaining it)?
       | 
       | I expect you'll get a few git clones from engineers to poke
       | around to see how it was built, out of curiosity, but not much
       | more.
       | 
       | Of course the natural response would be "who cares? They opened
       | the source so you can if you want to!"
       | 
       | That's fair. I guess I just get stuck on the "why"
        
         | serial_dev wrote:
         | Sentry is in a similar boat, it's (almost) open source, and you
         | need a very beefy machine to even start all the necessary
         | services, it's not a simple set up by any means if you want a
         | comparable experience to the real thing...
         | 
         | And still, people do get that done, and it is great that you
         | have the self hosting option if you don't like their pricing
         | (or if they ever go suddenly bankrupt, compromising your
         | business).
        
         | abe94 wrote:
         | Hey, yes most companies would not want to self host, and for
         | them there are plenty of options, but we do have companies that
         | opt to self host. There are few reasons we have seen so far
         | 
         | - Operating in a regulated industry, we have customers who
         | cannot send customer data to 3rd party services (in financial
         | services, healthcare) and need to self host for that reason
         | 
         | - Existing solutions are too expensive for their business
         | model, we have Kenyan, Brazilian and Mexican consumer focused
         | companies from other countries spin up and use the self-hosted
         | solution
         | 
         | - Cost savings and Philosophy, believe it or not there are some
         | companies which like to self host software if possible, and
         | have dedicated dev ops resources already maintaining software
         | and spinning up another solution is not that much incremental
         | work.
         | 
         | Beyond that there are other reasons to want to open source a
         | solution like this. Anyone can add communication channels and
         | integrations for example. And lastly its fun to work on an open
         | code base!
        
         | jnsie wrote:
         | While I see your point (and largely feel the same way) I
         | suppose the other side of it is pull requests. Nice to enable
         | the community to provide supplemental software development.
        
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       (page generated 2024-06-05 23:00 UTC)