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Comment by codersfocus | Hacker News Reader

I think if you’re targeting developers, SES is your biggest competitor. Their very cheap pay as you go pricing is more attractive than your monthly pricing. If email templates with react is your usp, I think I’ve seen libraries that offer that already.

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Resend seems to be a UI layer on top of SES, so it is probably not a competitor. People could use SES directly, but if the target group for Resend is a “modern front-end dev” then they probably do not want to, or do not know how to, and thus need that UI layer.

For example, I maintain a popular email sending library (Nodemailer) and if I could get a penny any time some user files an issue with something that is clearly basic for anyone who has ever even touched email, I would be quite wealthy. All these people are good match for a service like Resend, they just want to send mail for a reasonable price and do not care the slightest of what is going on under the hood.

> but if the target group for Resend is a “modern front-end dev” then they probably do not want to, or do not know how to, and thus need that UI layer.

I find it hard to believe there are a ton of this persona calling shots on what email service to be paying for..

> I think if you’re targeting developers, SES is your biggest competitor.

Cloudflare via MailChannels is virtually free: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sending-email-from-workers-with-...

It lacks tooling / observability that a marketer would want though.

Are there any unpublished limits for this? Asking for a friend :)

There are no unpublished limits. I'm the CEO. We don't specifically limit Cloudflare traffic.

How does this work if we don't need to validate domain?

We have a lot of anti-spam capabilities in the platform and if you abuse the service to send actual spam, your account may be rate limited or blocked. But if what you are sending is good email and we don't see signals to indicate it is abusive, then there aren't any limits on how much you can send.

This is quite cool than - will give that a try!

But SPF and DKIM, how do I configure that?

There’s a UI for it in Cloudflare once you have a domain. Seems to work pretty well - emails from my new domain go to directly into inboxes, no spam markers I’ve heard of.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/platform/functions/p...

Watch this space.

SES has a terrible developer experience.

We use it and don't plan on switching for a few reasons, but I would not recommend it to most folks.

I think this is a fair criticism, however it's clear that there is a market for "polished, dev-x first, react focused cloud platforms". Just look at next.js and Remix, both of which solve problems which are already solved by combining normal cloud providers and open source libraries, but crucially with a lot more head-desking and glue code.

Does SES still have a reputation for being flagged as spam more often than other senders?

SES reputation is medium at best. But they allow everyone to send emails so you get what you pay for...

Which competitor has the best reputation for transactional mails?

Email is old and established, so basically you get what you pay for.

We’ve found deliverability to correlate directly with the price of the service we’re using.

The cheaper the company offers access to a sending IP, the lower the quality of people using it, since price is the number 1 factor for spammers (a necessity since untargeted cold email spam has low conversion rates).

Resend is, or at least at launch was, using SES as their email provider.

Sucks because SES reliability is a mixed bag and more competition would be good.

Is there something that's cheaper than SES and similar in reliability? Do Oracle, Google/ Microsoft Cloud offer something similar (pricing and endpoints)?

doesnt resend use SES themselves to send emails? domain dns settings in their dashboard appears to hint at this IIRC

Going against the cheapest in the market in a race to the bottom is a fool's errand

I tried Resend and Custom Email feature reveals SES. I think it good when Resend build on top of SES

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