That seems nice! But why is it an iOS only app? It could be a website, or better yet a PWA. Since it lets you create an email alias, it should not be bound to an app in my opinion.
Glad you like the concept, @anna_0x !
One reason we started with iOS is so the user can resurface the email(s) on the go, like sales or loyalty coupons on a shopping trip. We’ll start pushing out more features related to this soon.
Don’t worry, a web interface is next.
Read the Terms of Service before signing up for this one. What you're signing up for is not an email passthrough service, it's a data collection service that requires you to give them your purchase details.
Pretty shitty bait and switch based on what the product shots show here.
@parterburn We’d love to help clarify this for you and others:
1. We do not sell any user’s personal information — full stop.
2. We do sell aggregated de-identified and anonymized data.
It sounds like you likely didn’t download the app because we explain this to all users within the first 30 seconds of onboarding. The product shots for the hunt are the product — you, as the user, are entirely in control of when and where you give out your email alias.
@parterburn NAILED IT. This is not a 'free' product designed to improve your experience of email. It's a profit-driven app that collects useful (supposedly anonymized) sales data they sell to others.
@parterburn@epic_science
We understand privacy and data are concerns that many people rightfully have.
More people are increasingly aware that companies sell data including several of the most common email services. Some of them even sell your individualized data as "John Smith."
We do not. We'll say it once more: we do not sell your individual data to anyone.
We do sell anonymized data (such as more people get emails from Macy's than Kohl's).
We deeply respect that it is your (and everyone else's) choice whether to trust companies. If you doubt our sincerity and approach, then maybe our product isn't the best fit for you right now. We hope to earn yours and other's trust.
@epic_science@tristanmace the terms of service on your website describe your company as a price protection service where users share their logins to different sites with you, competing with something like @appearny than anything else. None of that is described in the app screenshots or your replies, so my biggest flag for the Product Hunt community is to be careful as it's far from transparent what users are actually signing up for.
To be clear, I have no issues with the business model, just the business practices. With Earny you know what you're signing up for without reading the legalese of a ToS, which is not the case with Margin.
@parterburn cc @epic_science Appreciate the explanation and that it helps clarify the disconnect.
This hunting on Product Hunt caught us a bit by surprise as we were not officially launching until next week (during National Clean Your Inbox Week).
We initially had a price match product (like Earny and Sift), but instead decided to focus on the email alias concept as we heard time and again from users that email communications are not good for them. The terms and privacy policy currently up were for our old price matching product, not email alias. Our updated terms and privacy will be up this week when we officially launch.
As far as users understanding what they’re signing up for, during the onboarding experience we explain: “Your data stays safe. We don’t sell your personal data (only anonymized for research trends).”
We think this is forthright to the user so they understand, and ultimately what we’re doing involves less email integration than existing price matching products.
So, from what I see, users sell their data to you in return for an alias and some filters? I see you let advertisers inject ads into existing emails and also brands know more about how the users are using their emails? How is this different to creating a separate email address on sth like gmail or yahoo?
@trolling42 We’d love to clarify a few points.
1. We do not sell any user’s personal information — full stop.
2. We do sell aggregated, de-identified and anonymized data. In other words, we use all of our data — none tied to individual users — to identify and cite market trends. We believe this makes a better consumer-brand relationship in terms of both communication and product selection.
3. Advertisers do not know about the user or the user’s personal information. Ad targeting is blind to the brand, and we work with brands on campaigns that are complementary, co-operative to add value to the user. We love building product, but as we do have bills to pay and families to support, we look for ways to pay them while adding value to users. We’ll consider releasing a paid, ad-free version in the future.
And how is it different than just creating a separate email? Margin helps you get the emails you want in your personal inbox — your receipts, promos and codes from brands you shop at, without the noise you don’t want. We have a storage feature that removes old messages so you never have to periodically clean out your “throwaway” email account. We also have a couple other really cool filtering features coming out soon that will show how different we can be.
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