Ask HN: What's a good transactional email service for small projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a good transactional email service for small projects?

7 pointsrpastuszak10 comments

Hi there,

I've build a bunch of smaller projects trying to give people alternatives to social media (e.g. https://potato.horse) and noticed that a lot of people actually decided to subscribe to the content through email. The problem is that I didn't expect any significant traffic, so ended up sending emails personally (I'm THAT lean).

Although this is great from marketing perspective (people like speaking with real people, who would've guessed), this scales very poorly.

I've used Mailchim/Mailgun in the past, but I was wondering if anything changed in the past few years in that domain.

Here's what's important to me (in order of priority):

- a good API client, well documented API (I want to spend max 1 day of setting it up and plugging into 2-3 projects)

- custom domain support

- no privacy-dubious practices (ideally, I'd just call the API with a list of messages and store the contact list on my side)

- good record with spam blockers (I'm aware that this depends mainly on my domain)

- ideally less than 10$ per month for ca 3000 emails (I don't think I'll exceed that too quickly)

What I _don't_ care about:

- any marketing related features, I just want to automate email delivery

Most of my sites are on Vercel or Cloudfront, but I'd rather avoid spending too much time with AWS and go for something really simple. I don't want to spend too much time on infra.

I'm happy with any "mainstream" language, but I'd rather use node + Typescript since I use it on a daily basis at the moment.

Got any tips? Should I use a SaaS platform for that? Or should I just set up a DO Droplet with a service and use that instead?

Amazon SES is very simple, you don't have to set up any infra on AWS, just call the API from wherever.

For 3000 mails a month, you'll spend $ 0.30.

Disclaimer: I work at AWS.

Not related to them in any way, but I have used Postmark in several (larger and smaller) projects and have always been very happy with them. They are not dubious at all, have reasonable pricing, good documentation, responsive support and are very open and honest about their operational status.

Postmark has worked pretty well for my projects.

- Don't setup your own for this. Go with a SAAS since email delivery is a hard problem and not worth building your own

- I use a combination of sendgrid, mandrill (mailchimp) and sparkpost. All 3 are decent. Sendgrid is easiest to start with since it doesn't require domain validation but I prefer Mandrill since it shows much better logs including the actual body of the email. Problem with mandrill is that it got acquired by mailchimp and now requires a mailchimp subscription. Next is Sparkpost which I highly recommend. Sendgrid works but can have delivery issues especially if not using dedicated IP. AWS SES is not bad to be honest but considering it is AWS, there may be a bit of learning curve compared to say Sendgrid.

What is your volume and are you looking for a paid service or for a tool? Sendgrid saved my ass when google discontinued their mail service in appengine so I'll recommend them, but only if they match your requirements.

Hej, 2-3k emails per month. I don't expect much more, these are small projects for some very specific niches.

I'll check out send grid, thanks for the tip.

(I've also updated the original comment with those details, HN messed up the formatting a bit, sorry!)

Edit: Sendgrid looks just perfect for my use case, will try to spike sth today, cheers.

Go for Yandex 360 (formerly Yandex Mail for domains)

Key points:

- Absolutely free

- Add your domains

- Set DMARC, DKIM & SPF

- Almost unlimited storage for emails

- Adding multiple users (email accounts) free

- Additional features included like Drive, Docs etc.

Note: We use it for FreeTools.Dev (https://freetools.dev) and it works very well (such as SMTP delivery)

Like others here I recommend AWS SES. But you will need to manage DMARC, DKIM and SPF.

Another very well done service but maybe a little expensive is Postmark. I really like their simple and clean interface, their working code samples, and their focus on good delivery. I am a happy customer and I recommend them.

I know you said avoid AWS , AWS SES is really pretty simple and cheap. If budget is any concern might be worth investigating it. You can have it generate smtp credentials and use them with whatever client you want.

https://ohmysmtp.com/ Was mentioned in another HN thread the other day. Looked good enough for me to bookmark it.

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