Lob in San Francisco provides the building blocks for developers to automate offline correspondences. Enterprise companies use Lob’s suite of APIs to mail fully dynamic and personalized customer communications with print media. Lob also provides insight into deliverability with piece-by-piece tracing and a proprietary Print Delivery Network to streamline production across fully redundant nodes all over the country.
Lob integrates like a SaaS company. PFL has limited technical integration. Lob allows us to scale through the same technical integration. Everything is self serve with Lob while it seems everything at PFL requires some interaction with a human.
Root keeps Lob because it is already deeply integrated into our systems, and replacing it would require significant engineering effort with limited expected cost savings. As well as the unknowns that come with other options, switching vendors would likely require a significant …
Lob has always been able to show us our mailing and projected volume very timely and accurately, and has consistently delivered solutions in the majority of cases. However, due to the complexity and variability of the insurance industry, unique situations occasionally arise that may fall outside their current capacity or operational model.
In my opinion, the admin usability is horrendous. Specifically when looking for specific mailers, the search and pagination UI requires back end loading, it doesn't allow opening in new browser windows, it doesn't remember state when clicking into mailer requiring you to search again. I've started using Claude Code integrated with the API instead of clicking through the Admin UI because, in my experience, it is so hard to use.
Root keeps Lob because it is already deeply integrated into our systems, and replacing it would require significant engineering effort with limited expected cost savings. As well as the unknowns that come with other options, switching vendors would likely require a significant multi-quarter effort without clear cost savings or efficiency gains.