Show HN: Anypost – transactional and broadcast email API, 8¢ per 1k | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Anypost – transactional and broadcast email API, 8¢ per 1k

anypost.com

25 pointsdancablam18 comments

We think it's too damn expensive to send email these days. We built Anypost on modern (non-cloudy) infrastructure to ensure we can offer a top-shelf product without having to hit you with the cloud tax. We're not looking to be the next unicorn. We just want a sustainable product that helps solopreneurs and high-volume senders get their message out without having to worry about the bill.

We're around - feel free to ask questions!

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I didn’t immediately see any discussion of deliverability. That’s like the number 1 criteria anyone sending email in production cares about.

Agreed. Our team's background is in deliverability. Our last startup was a deliverability company founded in 2014, grew to ~20,000 paying customers, and sold in 2020 so we know the space very well and have built Anypost around those best practices. Also happy to provide guidance to anyone who needs help with it. I can go into any specifics if interested.

I started to get interested and then realized it's yet another monthly subscription based email platform. One of the main reasons SES is popular is it is pay what you use.

In addition, it's not immediately clear if SMTP is supported, but you might want to add that if not since it's the standard. Your api might be cool but avoiding vendor lockin is cooler.

We do in fact support SMTP - we'll work to make that more prominent. And I understand your take on the subscription model - we're chewing on some pay-for-use models.

Looks great. Also great work on https://emailmd.dev

Hey thanks!

Looks good. How’s your security? These days everything hinges on email for auth (particularly with email code sign in being so popular) so if there is a breach that’s a lot of exposure. Security is the one aspect that would make me hesitant to try a newcomer email API.

Matt from Anypost here :)

Great question and I'm happy to speak at least from the non-engineering perspective. The platform is designed such that we don't retain any customer data, we only process the email transactions, so that helps with the blast radius a bit.

We're also in the process of beginning our SOC2 audit to add some confidence through that lens.

Our team previously built a few products in email, including an end-to-end encrypted email service for regulated customers, so there's a lot we've learned and done in the past that informs how we build secure products today. I've also personally built compliance and security product strategy for large developer products which means security is a first-class discipline for us.

Dan, I'm sure, would be happy to go into more specific, technical detail but I hope this information is helpful still.

Good to know that the team has email industry expertise, but how does having this expertise differentiate you vs a competitor that, presumably, has team members with industry expertise as well?

Most do have email industry expertise. But for whatever reason email infrastructure expertise seems to be a dying breed with most providers pushing their infrastructure into major cloud providers. It has its benefits, but its costs too - and those get passed on to you. Our background has been in email infrastructure (managing it ourselves instead of paying a 3rd party to do it and sticking you with the bill).

I was excited to sign up for this. But, I never got your verification email, so I can't sign up. That should be your bread and butter.

Ok nevermind, it showed up, but took longer than I expected.

Glad you got it! I'll send you a personal email from me so you can reach out if you have any more issues.

We saw your sign up! Looks like your domain has greylisting enabled. Nothing we can do but obey that limit. You should get it if you try again or wait for our retry: Message was greylisted, try again in 1 minute 50 seconds

What is the differentiator here? Why would anyone choose this?

Fair question. Here are a few reasons:

- Pricing wins against pretty much any provider (and is an order of magnitude lower than many incumbents). - Especially when compared to SES, we're a dev-friendly, fully modern sending platform and we don't require you to glue a bunch of services together. - We're self funded from previous acquisitions in the space. We're focused on good customer outcomes instead of investor outcomes. - We have a pretty cool templating platform that allows you to write simple markdown instead of convoluted email-compatible HTML.

A race to the bottom on pricing is just going to get you very low quality customers which in turn will tank your sending reputation. I think you're approaching this backwards.

In my experience everyone appreciates lower prices - and good senders should be rewarded with lower prices.

If you allow spammers on your network things get a lot more expensive. So you can't offer low prices and allow low-quality senders. That's why we have a strict AUP and aggressive measures to detect spammers, phishers, and non-permission (aka cold-outreach) messages.

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