check-if-email-exists VS SimpleLogin

The point is not about ideological debates, making money from GPL software is purely a practical business decision. Many people are doing it, see e.g. https://reacher.email/ (written in Rust btw).

I started with open-source.

I initially created https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists, after some years it got to ~50 stars and nice overall feedback, that's when I thought of a SaaS wrapper on top of it.

So a possible path is "idea -> open-source -> monetize". I find the first arrow to be easier to execute than a direct idea to monetization leap.

We forked (this repository)[https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists] and made a few modifications.

I run an open-source [1] email verification API, called Reacher. I managed to hit 10k ARR this year (1st year).

It's written in Rust, self-hostable, and does not use a DB of emails (like some competitors do).

Landing page: https://reacher.email.

[1]: https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists

Check If Email Exists\ (205 comments)

GitHub issues like this one warm my heart:

https://github.com/reacherhq/check-if-email-exists/issues/91

Identifying something that needs doing, especially when you have no idea how to do it, is a bold skill.

Too often have I seen engineers be reluctant to open an issue because they don’t know how to implement it, technically. I still do it, myself. If you need it then you’ll find a way.

The converse is also true: losing focus by filing tasks and procrastinating on features because you know how to build them, not because you actually need them to move your business / project forward.

>Email aliases, mailing lists, subaddressing and catch-all addresses support.

Another feature that would be nice to have built-in is masked hide-my-email aliases for privacy like the cloaked email services from iCloud, FastMail, SimpleLogin, Cloudflare email routing, etc.[1]

For now, I use the typical aliases addresses in Dovecot but it doesn't hide the real email when replying. Also, creating new aliases in Dovecot-based email systems is very tedious and cumbersome because you have to go through the cPanel interface to create new aliases. (Some suggest using "catchall" to simplify manual creation of new aliases but that's not workable when spam robots constantly send to new random addresses in your domain.) The cPanel/Dovecot aliases also don't have metadata so you can add details on what the alias is for and when it was created.

[1] masked email services

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105078

https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406536368911-Ma...

https://simplelogin.io/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-email-routing

Note that other than Mozilla’s Firefox Relay and Apple’s Hide My Email there's also SimpleLogin: https://simplelogin.io/

Also the Bitwarden password manager has an integration for SimpleLogin.

Have you reported it here? https://github.com/simple-login/app/issues

To accomplish this, first create a SimpleLogin acct by logging in with Proton. Once thats done go to https://app.simplelogin.io/developer and create a website. Give it your authentik URL.

Yes, you can also use aliases with your 10 accounts for unlimited addresses and to conceal real addresses. https://simplelogin.io (or apps for iOS/Droid). Owned by proton. Use your proton credentials to login… simple login is included with some plans.

I know about https://simplelogin.io/ and as far as I know it is used under the hood by ProtonMail to implement the functionality.