Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the launch. I’m currently starting my own startup, so I can give you my impressions as a potential customer.

Contact-based pricing is bad. You’re trying to create an email platform for SaaS, from the features perspective (yey!) but you’re charging just as mailchimp and everybody else does (nah!).

Instead, as a founder, I’d rather prefer “active user”. If someone tries my product, but they never return, I don’t want to be charged for. So, in any given month, count how many people I have emailed (during that period), and that counts as pricing.

Just my 2c. Good luck!

Yep it’s great feedback! You can pretty easily slim down your contact count to follow that active user model if you’d like already :)

In practice that is a major bummer. You can’t distinguish between a new subscriber and a re activated subscriber.

With filters you should be able to do it pretty easily assuming you have the data in Loops already. Always ways we could improve though!

This is something I definitely struggled with for a few apps I have built in the past. This will come in super handy for my current app.

I have no idea what contacts means in your pricing. Everytime I send a transactional email to a new address is that a new contact?? Pass on that. Mailgun and Brevo don't bill on that...

That's one thing I never understood about email service providers, the weird obsession with "contacts". I don't care, they are just email addresses. I might need to email a customer once or twice, that doesn't make them a contact. If a service insist that each email needs to be a contact, I'll just add and remove the contact before and after each email sent.

They're targeting SaaS and SaaS means traditionally a signup is needed to be a customer which turns into a contact.

Yes, but free trials are a thing.

ya just to chime in, this is also a deal killer for me. I don't have any interest in per contact pricing. We have a ton of users who don't pay us very much.

We're trying a different model - pay for your core audience and any emails (product updates, user touch points, and transactional) are all included. If you have a use case that sends outside of your core audience (maybe sharing content with non-users of your product, we bill on a more traditional email volume pricing.

Potential SaaS customers register trial accounts all the time. Do each address count as a new contact even though they only receive, say, an activation email once and never come back?

You could remove those contacts and not be charged for them however if you only email someone once that started a trial account you’re doing your business a disservice in our experience.

bugging them constantly is a great way to get on spam lists and not be able to send emails at all.

this is just extortion in pricing. no competitor does this. good luck.

As someone who formerly lived in email marketing, the onboarding flow for a trial signup was usually a 7-day flow, 2 emails on the first day, the first was very transactional and automatic for activating your account, the second one was still automated, but a few hours later, and from me (the developer of the product) providing my personal email for any questions. Then one email per day with a tip on how to use the product effectively with mini-case studies from customers.

This converted at 9-15% depending on time of year and product. We built a lot of micro-SaaS offerings.

Our conversion before we did this onboarding multi-touch email approach was closer to 1-2%. These onboarding emails really do work with get a customer engaged and using the trial instead of signing up, and forgetting about it because it was free.

After that, if they converted, they would be moved into a different flow with a less frequent emails (weekly or monthly depending on the product). If they didn't convert, we had a second flow that would lead to an extended trial or discount which would convert another 3-5%.

Effective trial marketing is very important to sign ups. Our "marked as spam" and unsubs never went above 2% because we were providing value in our emails for a customer who signed up for a trial for a reason.

Yes, we send follow up emails to remind them to get things setup. But I don't send much mail beyond that. I do not like sending spam. Conversion is around 10%.

what provider did you use?

I still don't get it; let's say I have 100+ signups a day on trial accounts and 200k+ paying clients which almost never receive email from us, but do sometimes (maybe 1-2 times every few months). What are we looking at?

Pricing page: “(actually) simple pricing”.

Also: More than 5000 contacts, “CONTACT US”.

Had the same question. Moved to useplunk afterwards.

Yep all pricing is available when you click “view all pricing tiers” on the primary highlighted card.

Sorry that wasn’t more clear!

Why not just make it $x amount per email? Way simpler imho. This whole contact stuff feels very nickle and dimey.

yah sorry, there is a button there "view all pricing plans" that will get you up to 100k contacts.

My company has 500k+ "contacts", but we rarely send emails. It seems to me like your pricing can't work for me, so I'll stick with Brevo/SendInBlue until you decide to change that pricing.

I don't get why the pricing is based on contacts. Why not charge based on emails sent? This is probably where most of your expenses are, instead of charging on storing contacts in the DB and querying them. I have a SaaS B2C with more than 10k contacts and I don't send lots of emails.

That's why Sendy is a good option for me.

We starting using your API for light volume transcriptional emails a few weeks ago and honestly the integration process was so smooth it was anticlimactic. It just all worked.

that's what we're hoping happens! it should just work so you can get back to work

thanks for giving us a try :)

Do you send emails directly or are you using a separate service like Mailgun? Do you provide dedicated IPs? How do you guarantee delivery and avoid being blacklisted?

FWIW, your service seems priced in a way that encourages spam (send unlimited emails to an address).

Right now we're using AWS SES for our MTA. We've had a pretty great experience with them to date. We don't currently offer dedicated IPs but we likely will in the future. When we do, we want to make sure that customers have the required send volume to actually see a benefit from using one. I think a lot of services offer dedicated IPs too early as a panacea for increasing delivery rates. What we've noticed is that these initial IPs are warmed up so perform well, but over time, if the send volume is too low, it's reputation can atrophy.

We monitor our delivery platform wide and proactively contact customers if there are issues with their account.

As far as spam, yes, we allow you to contact within your own audience as much as you like but we do monitor this for abuse.

This is a cool product, but it feels a bit confused.

It seems the innovation here is making the management, editing and publishing of emails much more streamlined through your interface. That's great as it's definitely a frustration of creating emails.

But in the pricing you are focusing on contacts (and therefore "number of emails sent"). First of all, it's very difficult to guess what "contacts" are when considering transactional emails. What if a new user signs up but never uses the app again? Is that a new contact? If I send one marketing email it could be to 200k contacts, but I may only have 1000 transactional emails/contacts per month.

Instead of focusing the pricing around contacts and "emails sent" why not allow customers to "bring their own email platform". This would absolve you of having to worry about email pricing. A custom can connect SendGrid, MailGun or whatever they want. You can then focus your product on the publishing experience (and probably charge a lot more)

Thanks for the detailed feedback! We find that users start their company, use us for everything then never have to think about how to contact their users. Requiring a bring your own solution is great for more mature businesses but we’re targeting early stage right now and asking someone to signup for a second service to use ours feels like it may slow things down.

Ah interesting, I understand. Definitely makes sense if you're targeting new companies that aren't worried about emails/contacts in the beginning.

Wondering how this differs from something like Customer.io or Userlist?

Have some friends also working in a somewhat adjacent space (Audienceful) so will be watching you guys closely.

But in general it seems email is pretty crowded these days and a lot of the sub-niches are also pretty crowded (eg. Klayvio in ecomm, Customer.io in Saas, Substack/ghost in newsletters, Convertkit for wordpress bloggers, etc).

And for the most part all these apps are just sending on the big API-based senders under the hood (Eg. Amazon SES or Sendgrid). Even the newcomer API-based senders like Resend are just a wrapper around Amazon SES. Which makes any claims around differentiated deliverability on any email platform dubious at best.

Is the plan to build your own sending infra long term?

I would like to! It’s probably a bit further down the line for us.

You can do a lot to improved deliverability once you approach it at a platform level. We have access to various datapoints at scale that we can use to help individual users improve their deliverability vs working directly with the sending infra. Beyond that, we offer a platform that helps reduce pain and friction that might exist with more barebones, infrastructure focused services.

They offer a free plan :)

Not sure if this is a good or bad signal. The others don't offer free no CC plans because as soon as you get even the smallest bit well known you get swamped with spammers signing up.

We do a lot to prevent it, part of the reason we waited to launch. There are also hard caps with the free plan.

Hah yeah that too! Free, no credit card required.

It looks interesting but where is the pricing section? Do I have to contact you to know how much I will pay? That's a big deal for me

https://loops.so/pricing

Click "view pricing tiers" for all tiers up to 100K :)

Must go paid at $50/mo after waitlisting 1000 emails, got it

Any plans of open sourcing your MJML extensions? We hand-code MJML for our mails and fairly frequently run into compliancy problems.

Runs kinda counter to your business-case I suppose, but might help someone (me) out :)

Its definitely come up! I think it would be cool to have a community working on the translations to MJML from Lexical. There are so many corner cases and email clients out there, it's definitely a challenge to get things working everywhere. What type of compliancy problems have you run into?

I would really like to eventually open source core parts of Loops.

I think parts of the editor makes sense, including the MJML. We spent an entire weekend extending MJML for Superhuman and it would be cool to release that work some way.

Can you elaborate on compliancy problems? Really curious as I quite like MJML.

This is good timing. Currently evaluating email send for a new app.

Cool, let us know how we stack up!

Personally, I find the Product Hunt upvote stuff front & centre to be quite distracting (and verging on devaluing to the product offering, in a lot of cases).

I understand the reasoning for it being there, but perhaps kick it further down the page so the service / offering is the focus.

Totally fair, we just launched a week ago (and it went well) so we wanted to keep it up till the end of the month.

Will certainly place it in the footer and switch off the upvote portion in the future.

Producthunt seems more like feature hunt with the multiple launches (releases).

Yeah I noticed they moved to a “hub” model which I think encourages that. Not a bad thing imo, companies were already treating it this way and they just formalized it. Fwiw, this was our first product hunt post for our product.

Agreed. Product hunt climbers and what hackers like is mutually exclusive these days. As soon as I see product hunt badge I think oh it's for them...

I'm in the middle of bootstrapping a SaaS company and spent the last few days evaluating e-mail providers. I think my requirements are really simple, yet I seem to fall outside what most offer. Here it goes:

* A user-friendly WYSIWYG template editor (web fonts = nice to have but not crucial). * An API that lets me set the to-address and the e-mail content in markdown.

How can this pose an edge case?!

As far as the fonts - font support across email clients is.... not great. We offer it but warn our users that their chosen font might not be displayed in most cases.

Ideally, you'd be able to paste any markdown into our editor and have it render properly, but still something we need to work on.

A markdown to HTML (email) converter would be neat though.

How would markdown play in this case?

I would expect API to parse JSON with variables to replace in the templates.

Think of the markdown as the variable I'm sending (I'm doing the replacements myself before sending). I'd simply like to dress it in a template and send it to x.

My Firefox browser consumes 600% CPU browsing the homepage. Maybe an endless loop somewhere? I use adblock.

I see this with Framer sites all the time. Happens in Chrome too.

Oof don’t love that! I’ll test with FF later today.

One issue I usually see with these services is related to not being able to send out email campaigns with "dynamic content" pulled from the client's DB or APIs (based on specific user/list segmentations)

Had cases where the exact same campaign or template had to be created multiple times due to the client wanting a slightly different intro/closing or even entirely different products and services promoted based on user/account preferences.

Sure, it could be managed with multiple campaigns/templates/lists but these duplications could easily be avoided by using slightly more advanced "segmentation logic".

This is usually the case where tracking/stats aren't that important but rather making sure the user receives relevant content.

Sure, you can mostly do that today with saved segments, merge tags and data variables. Would love to understand how we could do better though!

We use Loops to power some of our email things for Depot [0] and Resend for other bits of it. In general, it's been a pleasure to use.

I think there are some logic things to get right at the API level, like should I use events or contact properties to trigger loops? We're working on some of that and wish the guidance was a bit better/clearer. At the moment, any properties you send with an event get added to the contact, so it seems like contact properties are the way to go.

My last request would be to support array properties on contacts, as a given contact could be in multiple "things".

[0] https://depot.dev/

Hey thanks Kyle!

We'll follow up on the API feedback separately, but you're welcome to trigger with either. We break down the differences here: https://loops.so/docs/loop-builder/loop-triggers#trigger-fre...

How does this contrast with sendgrid? We use their api and do not upload contacts to them.....

We actually have a transactional API (https://loops.so/docs/transactional/guide#sending-your-first...) so similar in that way.

Beyond that, our goal is to offer the single platform for email for your SaaS. So we’re focused on bringing together product, marketing and engineering in a single, hopefully cohesive and delightful, experience.

Loops seems similar to the likes of Mailmodo [0], not Sendgrid?

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mailmodo

this is a layer on top of sendgrid. common functionality that a lot of users have to implement before any sendgrid api endpoint is invoked.

Have you thought about integrating with Sendgrid? Eg, if I'm set up on sendgrid NOW and could just plug that in and start using the service.

(I'm actually using Mailgun FWIW)

ah so bring your own MTA - that's an interesting idea and would definitely make it easier to switch over. How would you expect pricing to work at that point?

The same? You price per contact not per send after all

This is great, congrats on the launch. I can't wait to get away from customer.io but unfortunately the Make.com integration is a necessity for us. As soon as you have that, we'll be customers!

Thanks! We actually have an integration with Make launching soon. I can invite you to the private version, shoot me an email -> adam@loops.so

I’ll be needing email soon for what I’m building, I may try this. I’ve worked on emails at a past startup and would like to avoid the dread…

I will say I find the pricing quite concerning. Free until 1000, 50 / 5000, but then I have to contact you? Am I understanding correctly, 5000 subscribed users doesn’t seem like that much.

For what it’s worth I went to customer.io to compare pricing and found there’s so confusing I was lazy to figure it out…so I do appreciate the simplicity

Nope, hit “view pricing tiers” on the pricing page for a full list of pricing up to 100k contacts.

It needs to not be hidden behind a button, that’s on the list.

From the home page, clicking on Pricing does absolutely nothing. Clicking on other things in the menu goes to those pages, although by opening a new tab in a very user-unfriendly way. Maybe it's gated on having created an account first, but personally I wouldn't create an account without first having any information on pricing first, because there's a high likelihood that I might just be wasting my time.

Our intention is that it's clickable - I can't replicate this but others have mentioned it. What browser are you on?

Chrome on Windows

Ah missed it, thanks

This shared inbox approach reminds me of helpmonks.com, but more.

This is a neat concept - reminds me in some ways of mailgun when they were able to take a spin on email hosting to allow multiple domains relatively cheap but measure the number of emails.

I'll be signing up at least two things I can try it out with. The pricing information seems limited at present - until you realize it says 5000 poeple. Having one more paid category listed would be ideal.

Agreed, will rework pricing after this. You can click “View all pricing tiers” on the pricing page but it should really be visible. Will fix!

Looks really good! but with 200K subscribers I'm a bit hesitant to move from mailjet, who do I talk to to be able to try it with our upcoming campaigns?

Talk to us! We're happy to take a call, email, etc. :)

Shoot me an email (chris@loops.so) and happy to walk you through any questions you may have.

on it!

I like your website: it's simple and mostly easy to find things. I also like the concept.

I was looking for an API reference to see what I could do with your API, but didn't find one. It seems that information about API calls is scattered among more "how-to" oriented documentation. That's just fine, but it would also be nice to have some documentation oriented around endpoints and details of the API.

Thank you! API docs here, we should put it more front and center. I will adjust that.

https://loops.so/docs/add-users/api-reference#rest-api

This looks like a really nice and polished product, I am in the same space, I've been working for a while on a similar project, pretty much feature parity but with one caveat, it's pay-once and use forever (1 year of free updates), self-hosted, no dependencies, one binary.

I'll be keeping a closed eye to you guys, it's pretty much what I wanted when I started my project.

What does it use on the back end for the mail delivery?

Thanks!

where can I see more?

Congrats on the launch. We are using it for our emails out to folks and it’s working well for us. I also had the pleasure of working with Adam for a while when I hired him to join the Training group at Datadog soon after I started the team. When he said he was leaving to start an email company I thought he was crazy. But it’s a really cool product.

Many email providers have black listed companies that have any connection to crypto. Do you support crypto companies?

Random endorsement - the founder Chris' twitter maintains a remarkably high signal to noise ratio in the marketing/startup/growth content niche - worth a follow - https://twitter.com/frantzfries

Congrats on the launch! Its been a far better experience than Mailchimp for us, even during the very early beta days.

How has your experience been using Lexical? Would love to get a sense of where you've run into limitations/etc as we're exploring it (albeit, for a very different use case).

Lexical has been great. I think the biggest drawback is that its an earlier project (compared to alternatives) so there are not always best practices for what we want to do. That said, the community is pretty active (in discord) and generally responsive to bug reports.

Congrats on the launch! For teams that are using something like customer.io, how does this fit into the picture? Is it a replacement or a companion?

And to nerd out a bit - how was working with Lexical? We chose Slate.js for our editor in Kitemaker.co but it's not as actively maintained as it once was.

Thanks! Yep, we often replace CIO for early and mid-stage teams.

Pricing, performance and UX are the primary drivers for switching that we have seen so far.

We were on Slate previously and actually rewrote our editor to support our switch to Lexical. It’s very early but it’s a cool platform. Wish they had a community outside Discord but that’s more personal preference.

We've been trying Loops for a while and love it. Using it currently on our web design curation site (seesaw.website) and it was the easiest tool we could find to integrate.

Thanks! We're very focused on ease of use so glad it worked out :)

I'm a happy user! for sure there are some small basic things I'd love to get (better filtering, user editing, etc...) but overall they get the job done. Good luck!

Oh nice! Thanks, yep there’s lots to improve. If you haven’t already, drop us a line in slack or live chat and we’re happy to log feedback then we’ll ping you when it makes its way into the app.

Will do :)

Chris, congrats on the launch!

Just a few questions, how does this compare to Substack, Beehiiv, Mailchimp, etc, looking to create an automated newsletter, will Loops work for this usecase?

Sure, what we've found is that many companies (including our own) publish a changelog, product update or newsletter at a monthly/weekly cadence. We can help solve for that.

There are also quite a few strictly newsletters using us as well which we're happy to support! We own workspaces.xyz and publish that as well via Loops.

How are you different from other tools? Why would I switch?

Depends on use case and which tools you’re using today but we try to make gains everywhere we can.

In pricing, we try to simplify by ditching the tables and anchoring around one metric.

For engineers, our documentation is decent and updated regularly. We try to have a performant API, support the integrations you’re most likely to use and include a versioning system with our transactional email.

For marketing, we built our editor around a text-based interface and make it highly customizable. We also take the pain out of having to test across multiple platforms.

For product teams, we offer templates that cater to specific touchpoints in the SaaS lifecycle.

Across all of that we offer unlimited team seats so you can actually have your entire team onboard and technical support for when things don’t work as expected or you have questions.

We create slack connect channels with any team that needs one (we have almost 1,000) and try to provide fast, technical support.

I've used it (no affiliation to the company).

I like it because it's easy. I'm not sure what the alternatives are, but I have the sense they'd all be more complex and more annoying to use (even if they might be cheaper).

Thanks! We're aiming for an easy to use modern platform, so thats great to hear.

Small website bug, hovering over Make.com in the integrations tab on the homepage shows the link and icon for Zapier. Congrats on the launch!

Ah thanks! In the middle of publishing that integration :-) We'll get that fixed.

i can't stand companies that monetize e-mail

Why?

Congrats on the launch!

Any plans to support multiple channels? (SMS, push, etc) And are you in the long run looking to compete with Braze, Airship, etc?

We’ve moved companies off of Braze already, but we still need to add multi-channel support. We’ll likely add it in the future unless customer needs materially change.

Congrats on the launch! QQ - do you track if the sent email is getting flagged as spam?

I like it and signing up! Also, what do you use for the docs? They're sleek!

Curious about what's wrong with Sendgrid/Mailgun/MailChimp (and the rest) that prompted rebuilding this again 10ish years later?

Or better yet Customer.io.

Also Brevo.

But this just means there's a market. It doesn't have to be special. Yay capitalism :)

Isn't 98% of email about having a clean IP range these days?

There’s a surprising amount of classifying happening at the content level. If you have a clean ip but then send content that raises flags (includes hot words, adult content, etc) then you’re going to be categorized differently in the inbox regardless.

Even without the borderline content, if it seems promotional, it may end up in promotions regardless.

98% of email is keeping a clean IP range. Getting a clean IP is good for maybe a week if you don't know how to keep it that way.

When I click "Pricing", I get no response.

Sorry about that. This link should work and happy to answer any questions here. https://loops.so/pricing

Happy customer of Loops - congrats on the launch!

Thanks for using Loops!

Any thoughts on the differences with Resend [0] (also a YC company coincidentally enough)?

I like them because they integrate quite nicely with their other product, React Email [1], where our devs can just write emails in React and it'll render to email-compliant HTML and CSS. I suppose you guys have a GUI as well but I believe they're looking to add that too.

[0] https://resend.com

[1] https://react.email/

Sure! Generally, we don’t think email copy belongs in your code base.

You can upload MJML if you’d really like to, along with designing in Figma via an integration, but really your best bet is our editor.

If we can save a few engineering hours just by having the product person that needs to update the emails with new copy actually update the copy instead of pinging engineering, we think we’ve improved things.

If a competitor ends up building a GUI, glad to see they agree too :)

fwiw you can use React Email pretty easily with anything by using their @react-email/render package [0] to render your email React components to HTML (this is effectively all Resend is doing in their Node library [1])

Just FYI since I happened to be looking into this recently as well :)

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@react-email/render

[1] https://github.com/resendlabs/resend-node/blob/90a7225c21db9...

Loops is the backbone of our enterprise lead qualification system. We'd built Lambdas on SNS to take care of a bunch of this emailing logic and were very happy to see Chris took care of it all. Every time we have a feature request or question, turns out it's on the roadmap.

Happy to share how we use it.

Thanks, your early support means a lot! Hope we freed you up to spend less time on email and more time on the rest of your company :)

Congrats, Chris!

Hi smca,

I came across your comments on Stripe on Hacker News and am reaching out in hopes you can assist with an urgent issue.

Account ID: acct_1N6UyxJ097OmyUsG

site：lovilds.com

Product: Women's Beauty and Skincare Products

My Stripe account has been closed, and $90,000 has been forcibly refunded to customers. I've been in touch with Stripe support, and they've told me my account is under review. It's been nearly two weeks.

Could you please help me understand:

1. Is there a chance for the $90,000 to be returned to my account? 2. Is there any possibility of my account being reinstated?

Your immediate attention to this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

how are you different than resend (another YC company) ?

Generally, we don’t believe email copy belongs in your code base.

You can upload MJML if you’d really like to, along with designing in Figma via an integration, but really your best bet is our editor.

We've extended MJML to support additional platforms and it's lightning fast to just send an email.

If we can save a few engineering hours just by having the product person who needs to update the emails with new copy actually update the copy instead of pinging engineering, we think we’ve improved things.

We also support product and marketing email, along with transactional emails.

Happy to expand on it if you have additional q's

How are you different than a Klayvio or Attentive?

To the best of my knowledge, Klaviyo is more focused on e-commerce and Attentive more on e-commerce but especially SMS. I'm not familiar enough with their platforms to give a point-by-point comparison, but we're focused on the needs of our users within SaaS. If a customer needs a thing, we're going to work with them to understand it and build it for them. I think if we follow that compass long enough we'll end up differentiated quite a bit.

Launch HN: Loops (YC W22) – Email for SaaS Companies