Cheap email provider for bootstrapping?
What email service providers are indie hackers using?
The usage will be mostly for transactional mails sent to users, which can't be from @gmail.com. I'd of course like to use Google Workspace, but that's not cheap.
So far I've seen Zoho Mail @ $12/year which is doable for getting things off the ground.
Any other providers you'd recommend considering?
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The cheapest is to use Amazon SES.
You can send up to 5000 emails per month for free (and 0,10 USD / 1000 after) using your own domain.
Just wanted to add to this, there is a software (one time fee) called sendy which is like a dashboard/gui to write up emails keep tracks of lists etc. that will piggy back off of Amazon SES. It makes the whole process and saves a lot of money in the process.
Sendy is fine for very small scale sending (and small cheap server), but you hit limitations with larger lists and it doesn't offer you a drag-n-drop template editor. An alternative is a hosted solution that you don't need to maintain yourself and gives you scalability beyond what your own server can handle.
See this comparison to Sendy .
Sendy also uses Amazon SES. Could you give me more detail about how it would not scale well?
It's in the comparison link I shared, but basically if your list is large (50k+) and you are using the smallest/cheaper server possible (common use case for Sendy users) then your bulk campaign can take several hours to go out vs. say 15-30 min on a hosted platform. Hard to optimize engagement when you can't optimize on send/delivery time.
Also, if you want to add a custom tracking domain (which helps inbox placement btw) Sendy charges extra for it (per domain or packs) where is in BigMailer.io that feature doesn't cost extra. So if you are a dev shop or consultant or manage several projects/websites then with Sendy your upfront cost is higher.
Great idea! Going to try this out. I see now that it's free only if your application is on an EC2 server in the same account presumably, just to clarify.
$0.10 per 1000 is still dirt cheap 👍
Note that if you'll be emailing users to validate their email first, you need to watch for bounces, otherwise aws might flag/suspend your account. I use neverbounce to try to check that the email won't bounce. However, it only works for certain email providers and not for others - for example, it doesn't work for icloud and yahoo - so if a user has a typo in their email address, it will negatively affect your bounce score with SES.
Even if your app tries to send the email multiple times to the same address which bounces, SES will just send it and bounce each time, so it's something that you need to handle on your side.
Do you use APIs to verify automatically within your application? Manual list verification is time consuming but should happen before any bulk/marketing sends. There are providers that are much cheaper than NeverBounce, see email verification provider comparison.
It's true that new email addresses can bounce at higher rate than Amazon SES can tolerate (and suspends account for), but it depends on email collection source/method. Most senders would be safe but you do need to keep track of this.
All email lists decay overtime at around 2-3%/month so if you wait say 6 months to send a bulk campaign to all your customers you could have a 10%+ bounce rate which will get your account suspended on most platforms.
Consider using a platform on top of Amazon SES, like BigMailer.io, that will take automatically process your complaints, bounces, and unsubscribes, manage your assets (templates, campaigns) and reporting/analytics for you. The platforms like that are usually hosted on EC2 to allow customers to leverage that 62K/month free tier and have free/startup plan as well.
Yeah, I'm using neverbounce's API. My use case is email confirmation when a user creates an account, not so much for marketing. There are many cases of either typos or just random emails that are invalid. Not enough to get suspended, since the bounce ratio is low, but something to keep an eye on. Also, it stresses me out every time I get a bounce email from SES.
Thanks for the comparison link, it's helpful! Your product looks very cool, there's definitely a need for something like it on top of SES.
If you have an AWS SES account outside the sandbox, you get 62k free emails every month. It’s up to you how you send those emails. They can be through email templates or raw emails. I’m not sure what you’re seeing about EC2/Application etc etc.
Bear in mind that I have a 4-5 year old AWS account which has everything I’m telling you. Maybe they’ve changed the rules for new accounts.
Ah yes, you're right I forgot to mention that :)
Consider using a platform on top of Amazon SES, like BigMailer.io, that will take automatically process your complaints, bounces, and unsubscribes, manage your assets (templates, campaigns) and reporting/analytics for you.
If you use Amazon SES directly you have to do some custom development to process complaints, bounces, and unsubscribes. Not to mention it's harder to optimize your email template when it's part of your application code. See full list of benefits.
I put together this comparison page for email service providers with free tier. There is a comparison table that helps you compare features and future pricing after free tier..
I see SendGrid mentioned a lot for transactional, but if you plan to send marketing emails in the future than you would have to pay separately for that. Same if you use 2 different platforms and you have to sync up all your data on top - bounces, complaints, unsubscribes. Consider a platform that supports both transactional and marketing emails. Think you might need RSS to email for your blog? Not everyone offers that either.
Great info thanks for sharing!
when i started i used the Zoho free option, is that still around?
more recently i have been hosting my website with Siteground and they offer free email accounts, so do you have any options like that?
For hosting so far I'm using a combination of Netlify and Heroku at zero cost so far. Might move to a solution like that at some point.
Zoho doesn't have a free option anymore that I could see.
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
just checked and i could see the "Forever Free" plan still not sure if it differs from place to place
thats what i use and have set a couple of friends up , can't fault it especially if you only need Up to five users, 5GB/User, 25MB max attachment size
Thanks you are 100% correct I missed that hidden gem. Just signed up and got everything configured. Thanks again!
I remember this being confusing and thinking they stopped it or changed it when I signed up last fall, but eventually I was able use zoho with my domain for free just fine.
I think it's helpful to breakdown the types of email services most online businesses need:
For transactional emails I'm using SMTP2Go. It's free for 1,000 emails per month. So far it's been great.
For general business email I'm using Fastmail which is $50/year.
I'm building a project for transactional emails - I actually just released the Beta API this week (and its free). It would be great to have you as a beta user!
If you are interested, you can check it out here: https://postheat.com
It's been a while since you asked this, but for https://watchmyssl.com/ I'm using a combination of AWS SES for automated/transactional emails, and Fastmail for manual ones (i.e. responses to transactional email, etc.).
I've used SES many times and I know it inside and out (cheap, reliable, bare-bones). I'm new to Fastmail and so far I'm loving it. In my previous projects I used Zoho, but Fastmail is far better, even though it costs a bit more ($5/month). It lets you manage hundreds of email addresses, easily creating new ones for your custom domains. Best of all, I can use the same plan for my future side projects without paying more.
Is anyone using https://www.mailerlite.com?
I use and am a partner with Constant Contact. Been doing that for 13 years. Happy to talk to anyone who has any questions about the product or who might be interested in the partner program (passive income, free account, etc.).
Was on the same boat 5-6 years ago. Went with the cheapest I could find at the time and had to spend precious time to migrate to Postmark. It’s not cheap but once I settled with it I had never spent a second checking for issues in delivering emails anymore.
If you have time to invest pick the cheapest, but if you can throw some money at the problem I suggest you to pick a reliable service and spend the time you gain in building the core of your product.
+1 for this. Need to consider future needs and the value you get.
Amazon SES for sending transactional email + mjml with handlebarsjs for templates. Would recommend using a different service for marketing and newsletters to manage lists/tags, sequences, and more.
Also, you can use AWS Lambda to easily receive business email for free (sending is harder though).
You can use a platform like BigMailer with a connection to your Amazon SES account and manage all email types in the same platform. The advantage is that all your bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes will be in sync, you will have a single customer view and can setup automations after say a transactional email is sent. You will get template editors and templates, image storing, segmentation, and analytics that you wouldn't have if you send directly from your application using APIs.
Hey @webbie! Personally, I’ve used https://sendy.co/ and https://muxemail.com/ due to overall better pricing. While self-promotion is fine, I think a little disclaimer saying you founded it would be nice.
Sure, but if you mouseover the username you can see projects listed :-)
I was pointing out that there are alternatives to using SES directly and listing advantages.
There is a whole bunch of platforms that work on top of SES, here is a 3rd party list of email marketing platforms via Amazon SES that I don't manage if you or anyone want to review and research options yourself.
Happy email marketing!
I use Zoho for two companies of mine. You can send emails from your domain name at zero cost. Can't beat 100% free.
I use mailgun for transactional emails, it has a free tier of 800 mails more or less.
I also use namecheap private email for my corp email, about 11 dls a year.
I have been using Mailjet for a while now. I find it really simple to use and get started, plus it's well documented. The good thing is that since you're bootstrapping you don't have to pay anything (I'm assuming you will have a very low volume of emails). Other options are, for example, sendGrid or Postmark
I ended up paying $10/month to Postmark after extremely poor deliverability with Mailgun. The difference meant that 99% of my emails get delivered, instead of the 10%+ bounce rate with Mailgun.
Just keep an eye out if the IP you are on ends up on blacklists due to other users. With Postmark, they separate transnational and bulk marketing mail to different servers, so your transactional mail with have decent deliverability.
It was a high price to pay at first, but it has paid off. The 1% of my mail that gets bounced is generally due to typos.
I actually used Mailgun on some work projects many years ago and experienced exactly what you described - we had to contact them several times to move us to a different IP. There's definitely a trade off when you choose a free solution, so just looking for a way to get off the ground then moving to a "proper" solution.
Completely understandable - especially since these services all charge in USD.
I remember reading blog articles about "how to bootstrap a company" 10 years ago... with brilliant ideas like trading in your car for a cheaper one and cooking at home instead of ordering in. Guys, we're in Africa, it's more like sacrificing food to pay for your 4mbps ADSL line while heating your bath water with literal fire. Fun times!
Mailgun has a great free plan that I use for transactional emails.
We use SendGrid - The free plan allows you to store up to 2,000 contacts and send 6,000 emails a month. The automation features aren't assss savvy as say an Active campaign but even their paid tier for automation/marketing is $50/mo for 40,000 contacts, 80,000 emails a month which is less than half of the big email marketing platforms. Fairly satisfied with it!
I use Zoho for my business inbox and SendGrid for automated transactional emails.
Interesting I've heard good things about SendGrid. Using SendinBlue on my side at the moment - 300 free sends per month.
SendGrid is great, using it for my platform too!