We don't sell user data and we make money by taking a cut of the savings we're able to claim on behalf of our users. It aligns our incentives and keeps us focused on maximizing the savings our users get.
We started building Paribus when we realized that most retailers were actually using PII and user information to price discriminate and overcharge their customers. The last thing we want to do is help enable these practices.
Fair point. That's why we make our business model extremely clear. We're out there to help users claim the money they're owed and keep 25% in the process. We're not out there to sell user data.
Also, you can set up a secondary account and auto-forward emails relatively quickly to a forwarding address linked to Paribus. On Gmail:
1- Go to filters and start creating a new filter: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/filters
2- In the from field, type: amazon.com OR bestbuy.com OR staples.com OR macys.com etc. with all the retailers for which you want to track receipts
3- Click "create a filter with this search"
4- Click "Forward it to" and add your forwarding address.
You should be all set after that (although you will have to change your filter if you want to add the new retailers as we add more)
>Also, you can set up a secondary account and auto-forward emails relatively quickly to a forwarding address linked to Paribus.
Oh, this is interesting, and should get around most of the privacy concerns. One question: how do you get the money back from the retailer? I had assumed that Paribus sent an email from the account, but that won't actually work if my email is zck@example.com and I give you access to zck-shopping@example.com. If you email Amazon from zck-shopping@example.com, would they refund zck@example.com? Or do you send me an email saying something like "Amazon dropped prices on $PRODUCT_X, contact them here<link> to get a refund"?
Hah ;) I love that you caught on on this quickly. Shoot me an email and I can go into more detail on how we do this. We handle all the communication on your behalf and have a couple of tricks up our sleeves.
Maybe a way to start by simply forwarding emails you want the system to process to a special email address. Kinda like how TripIt works -- I'm not even sure they ask for access to your email box until you've used the service by manually forwarding confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com for a bit.
Great seeing Paribus on HN! I really appreciate the feedback. This is definitely the biggest challenge that we're facing but we hope that as the user base grows we will gain legitimacy and convince people that we're out there to defend their interests. Obviously, we're taking all the precautions necessary, following security best practices, and collaborating with Context.io to keep everyone's mailbox secure.
On your second point, we could (and probably will) enable the feature of forwarding receipts eventually and but the reason we haven't done it is to keep the whole experience as seamless as possible - We want our users to do ZERO work - and we would still need to send the automated claims on their behalf. Sending users price drop alerts is just like giving them work to do (camelcamelcamel.com and plenty of other services do this).
What about providing people with a pass through email address to use on shopping sites? A nice value add there would be having the option to give a unique email address to each site to track who's fault spam is (I've been paying sneakemail for that for at least a decade).
Yeah, funny how this video was on Reddit's frontpage a few days ago, and this dude just happens to write a blog post about it without even mentioning the video.
We started building Paribus when we realized that most retailers were actually using PII and user information to price discriminate and overcharge their customers. The last thing we want to do is help enable these practices.