Pixily: Put Your Paper Docs Online in 3 to 5 Days Max
New startup Pixily lets small businesses and individuals send paper documents by mail in a Netflix style envelope, then scans, uploads to Amazon S3 and lets you search them in 3 to 5 days. It's the kind of service that big companies spend a lot of money on, now made affordable enough for anyone.
Boston Globe writer Scott Kirsner tested the service last week and saw even faster turn around - his documents were available on the Pixily website in one day and returned to him in paper form in two days after sending them. That's pretty awesome.
Keeping Costs Low
Pixily offers subscription plans from $5 to $60 per month, for your first 50 to 200 pages mailed in and with 1,000 to 12,000 pages of storage. All stored documents are made available in PDF format, so there shouldn't be any concern about losing them if you cancel your subscription.
This is the kind of service that cloud computing makes possible. The Amazon Web Services blog has a brief description of how Pixily uses multiple AWS offerings to keep their prices low.
Trusting People With Your Mail
The "mixed media" nature of this company, combining real world and digital, is one of the things that makes it so interesting. There are other services like this but each are a little different. See also Earth Class Mail, which intercepts your mail before it gets to you and lets you sort it online and Scribd's Paper to iPaper service, which is free, takes its sweet time in scanning your documents and then serves ads next to them online.
Are you willing to send important paper documents to a startup company online? Privacy and security could definitely be a big concern. We are quite interested to see how Pixily works and will report back after spending some time with our new subscription.
You can watch a 5 minute screencast about Pixily here.
Comments
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lmk how you like it. i'm a user and fan of earth class mail
Posted by: Baratunde Thurston
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July 23, 2008 12:54 PM
Crap - I saw Pixily this morning and put it on my list to write about this evening and you already have a great review!
Good job Marshall!
I think Scribd also offers to put your paper docs online.
Posted by: Andrei M. Marinescu
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July 23, 2008 1:26 PM
Would love a review when you've done that. I think I may have to do it too, but would like to hear real users responses first before I send them my money :)
Posted by: Lisa McMillan
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July 23, 2008 1:36 PM
This sounds like a phenomenal solution for small businesses, especially those with limited space, both for archiving and ongoing access. As both a brick and mortar guy and an web-biz guy, my bigger concern would actually be the low-tech snail-mail step in the process.
Look forward to hearing how it works for others.
Sure - I'm going to put all my important docs in the hands of someone else. Citi and Bank of America lose my data, but a small, underfunded startup will not?
RS: they actually send your documents back, so "losing your data" would not really kill you - different from earthclassmail, for instance, which gets your bills for you directly...
@Lisa McMillan
I just checked their pricing page and they say it is risk-free for 30 days.
http://www.pixily.com/ov/signup-pricing/
They say that you can cancel within 30 days and get the money back. They also have a free account. I am going to try the paid account later today.
This would be a great way to have a backup of your important files, but I think I personally would prefer a service where I could fax them in. I realize I would lose some resolution, but I never have stamps anymore! :)
They say to-and-from postage is included as part of the plan. To quote from http://www.pixily.com/ov/signup-pricing/ : "Pricing includes the cost of postage and return postage of processed documents."
It looks like a good service, however I'm doing nearly the same thing with my ScanSnap S510 and a JungleDisk account. True the up front cost of the ScanSnap is higher, but it's a lot faster and safer, especially since these documents don't go to a third party. I've scanned and OCR'd thousands of pages with this, and the files are up on Amazon's S3 via Jungledisk.
Still, this looks like a useful service if you don't want to spend up front.
I just finished seeing the demo. Their search is cool. It highlights the words in the paper - not even Adobe PDF reader does that. I can see myself saying goodbye to organizing documents and accessing them from anywhere with Pixily.
I echo Nitin ... why would I pay for this when I could buy a $350 ScanSnap and $20 JungleDisk and scan/OCR all my documents in a couple minutes each day, with privacy and quality control?
being able to easily share and search the documents are to very important aspects on using a web service instead of a scanner myself, I think..
also, don't understimate the power of 'I can do it later'. If you'll have to scan your stuff yourself, you'll fatally end up leaving it there forever... At least I do :-)
Scribd seems like it has a better service. We'll see if Pixily can differentiate their product, and make it CHEAPER. Might as well buy a scanner at this price point :(