Used it some years ago and thought that it was a really good front-end to the Steam store since the search interface is a bit lacking. Am surprised to see that this has millions of visitors but has such low running cost. Must be really highly optimized SQL queries and code there!

Recently decided to launch MessageDuck: https://www.messageduck.com after working on a few side projects but never actually launching for many years. It is similar to Mailcharts and ReallyGoodEmail, but for SMS which Mailcharts has as well but the price is out of our range.

Basically it is a library of thousands of SMS messages to help marketers get the latest SMS data and launch their campaign in minutes instead of days. Currently earning $0 and incurring some cost of about less than $100 a month but overall it meets our own need. It was an internal tool we used but we decided to launch it to the open web and see if there was any demand for it. Currently it has all the features of a MVP and already works great for us but we are adding some new features every month as well.

This is actually incredible useful for what I work with, very cool to get a pulse on brand strategies. How did you get the data in?

Thanks for the comment! We started with subscribing to some brands manually with our own number to see if the idea was viable for about a month before trying to do it at scale by looking for which brands offered SMS and using something like a Twilio virtual phone number to get the message they send to us via API to put in the database. We currently spend a few hours every month to do that and to add more features.

We have been reading these $500/month posts year after year and recently we have been holding back on launching our own as well. Recently we finally decide to just went in after months of working on it. It is called MessageDuck (https://www.messageduck.com) which was built while we were looking for a good solution for SMS data marketing.

We built this after we noticed that there was not much good solution except one which is quite pricey called MailCharts SMS. We are still working on it and we also have a code YC that you can use for 10% off our Pro Plan.

Hopefully, we can reach $500 by 2023 and we can Show and Tell as well.

That would be an interesting thought. He would or rather it would be infinitely more rational than any politician in the world.

That's my exact thought. Instead of building "dumb" if-else web app, maybe we could build the next-gen of web apps enhanced with AI that might prove to disrupt incumbents. I just wanted to see some examples of some of them at work to get a rough feel of the state of this prospect.

Yes, I agree. But I'm interested in areas like machine learning, weak AI areas in which your computer can make smarter personal or business decisions for you, which might actually be helpful the largest possible group of people.

Thanks for the answer. Their AI tech is quite amazing and with their 10M funding, they might be the next big thing since Siri.

Fantastic, just what I was looking for. Thank you.

Just a question: how did you get those vendors to partner with you. Did you approach them?

It can be both interesting and scary that algorithms are controlling every aspects of our lives. What are your thoughts on this?