Ping

GMAC Member

GMA Community

"Hey PH,I'm Sankalp, college student. Initially I built Ping for a friend.She wanted internships and was sending personalized cold emails one at a time. I wrote her a Python script in my terminal that sent ~400 emails from her Gmail with placeholder substitution. She came back: "Can I see who actually opened them?" I added an open tracking pixel.She came back again with a spreadsheet of who replied, who didn't, who needed a follow-up nudge in a week. I automated that too as auto follow-up sequences that stop on reply.Two weeks later she sent ~1,200 emails (initial + auto follow-ups) to one specific company she wanted to work at. The HR team eventually wrote back asking her to please stop her campaign because too many people in different departments had forwarded her email and they were already scheduling her interview.That's how Ping happened. The terminal script became a Chrome extension because she stopped wanting to ask me to run things.What it does today:- Pick a Google Sheet, write one template with {Name} {Company} placeholders- Sends each email individually from your real Gmail (no middleman SMTP, your reputation, your data)- Open tracking, click tracking, reply detection, WhatsApp-style ticks in your Gmail Sent folder- Auto follow-up sequences that stop when someone opens or repliesPricing context (priced honestly against the market):- Free: 50 emails/day, 3 campaigns/month, full tracking- Pro: $9/mo for 500/day, unlimited campaigns (₹749 in India)- For comparison: GMass $29.95/mo, Yesware $35/mo, Mixmax $29/mo, Mailmeteor $4.99-12.99/mo (smaller free tier)Why Pro exists: I would honestly love to keep Ping completely free. But the DigitalOcean droplet, domain renewals, Razorpay fees, and Google's verification security audit aren't free for me either, and I don't have another source of income to subsidize the tool. Pro is what keeps the lights on. If you can afford it, it directly funds Ping's hosting and lets me ship faster. If you can't, the free tier is built to actually be useful, not a trial trap.Honest things you should know:1. Google OAuth verification is still in progress. New users may see an "unverified app" notice on sign-in. The flow is Google's standard OAuth, your password never touches Ping. Click through is safe. The verification badge comes when I can afford the security audit fee that Google requires for the gmail.readonly scope.2. Built solo. No team, no funding, no investors. If you find a bug, ping me. I read every reply.3. We don't see your email contents. Sending happens browser to Gmail API directly. Our server only stores recipient email + subject (needed for the tracking pixel correlation). Bodies never touch our infra.4. Recently migrated from spreadsheets.readonly scope to drive.file + Google Picker. Means every sheet you import goes through Google's own file picker once, then access stays for that file only. Narrower than what most competitors ask for.Would love to hear what you'd want fixed, added, or removed. Especially curious if anyone tried similar tools and bounced because of price."