Can you tell us a little bit about your experience and the work you do?
Hillel Coren and I co-founded Invoice Ninja in 2014 with the goal to create the world’s largest open source platform for invoicing, payments, time tracking, expense tracking, and proposal creation for freelancers and small teams.
There was a major lack of free/nearly free and unlimited invoicing platforms that focus on freelancers. All the competitors were expensive, lacked basic features, or were unable to integrate with other freelancer SaaS tools.
We decided, strategically, that our goals could be best accomplished by developing our platform open source. Open-source does not mean free (although it usually does), it means that we offer the codebase for anyone to download and deploy on their own server.
Why did you make the decision to go open source with your product?
With the huge open source community deploying our platform across thousands of servers, we are able to test new features exhaustively for bug fixes and functionality before making them live to our hosted SaaS user base. This is a quality control aspect that companies multiples of times our size cannot match.
We are also able to develop new features incredibly fast. Since our codebase is online for anyone to download and install, many of our users in the open source community help build features that they want to see or use themselves, and then submit the feature for our review. We can then choose to implement or adapt as we see fit.
How are you using Postmark on projects today?
We're using the Postmark API to offer our users open tracking and a powerful statistics API. Tracking is critical for our users to know when an invoice sent for payment has been received, or viewed, or bounced. They can then add this data to their books, resend bounced messages, continue their workflows, etc. This is critical for businesses that facilitate invoicing, quotes, and payments.
If you could give fellow developers one piece of advice about how to implement and manage their transactional email, what would it be?
We are only now beginning to fully leverage the Postmark API to offer a more dynamic service for our users. I wish we had done this much earlier! First on the list is building support for reactivating bounced email addresses.