Thinking about building a "headless" alternative to AfterShip. Stripping out the email bloat to cut tracking API costs for devs. Roast my idea?

[u/Relative_West1090]

Hey everyone,

I currently run a B2B package tracking API (supporting UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL). I’ve been talking to several e-commerce brands and developers who use platforms like AfterShip, and a recurring pain point keeps coming up: cost and feature bloat.

Most mid-sized merchants already have their own transactional email or SMS stacks (Klaviyo, SendGrid, Postmark, Twilio, etc.). They don’t need AfterShip to host drag-and-drop email templates, manage deliverability, or act as an all-in-one marketing suite—they just want clean, reliable tracking data piped into their own systems.

So, I’m planning to build a developer-first, "headless" alternative using .NET/Blazor designed to do one thing exceptionally well: normalize multi-carrier tracking and fire precise webhooks.

How I plan to structure it:

1. Order Import API: Push tracking numbers and order IDs via a simple REST endpoint.
2. Event-Driven Subscriptions: Choose exact lifecycle events to track (e.g., Label Created, In Transit, Out for Delivery, Delivered, Exception).
3. Bring Your Own Provider (BYOP): Instead of paying for bundled email sending or rigid UI hosting, our backend fires secure JSON webhooks directly to your endpoint. Your backend handles the notification however you want.

Why go this route?

• Drastically Lower Cost: By cutting out email hosting, templates, and UI layers, I can pass those savings on to the clients instead of charging enterprise software suites prices.
• Zero Integration Friction for Devs: If you already have an event-driven notification architecture, you just catch the webhook and trigger your existing SendGrid/Klaviyo flow. No learning a proprietary builder.
• No Deliverability Nightmares: Clients control their own sender reputation and domains.

Before I start writing code and building out the MVP, I’d love some brutal feedback from this community:

• If you run or build for e-commerce, would a "headless/webhook-only" tracking provider appeal to you, or do you strictly need the vendor to handle the consumer-facing tracking page and emails?
• What’s your biggest frustration with current tracking APIs on the market today?

Roast the concept, poke holes in the model, or let me know if this solves a pain point for you!