Found an awesome deal for SMTP, the big benefit is that it is a one time fee. There are different tiers ranging between 20k and 1m emails per month with very reasonable pricing.
So essentially, pay once - get monthly quota for the life of the product (which is hopefully indefinitely). Can also pay for overage if it’s needed in the future, it is also possible to buy the deal several times and combine them into one account (each purchase being a workspace).
Buying these kinds of early startup limited time deals is a bit of a lottery, so do your own due diligence. But I think the risk/reward seems quite solid for this offering and the founder seems to know what he is doing. Have purchased a lot of deals like this and I think this one is likely a winner.
I believe you can get 10% off one your first purchase from that marketplace, can get another 10% with the marketplace ‘plus’ annual membership also (if you add that to your cart, should get both discounts for the first purchase).
I’ll throw in a good word with zero kickback or incentive for mxroute (or is it mxrouting?) for transactional emails. They’re really friendly for transactional emails with a lifetime plan. I got mine a while ago for a black Friday sale. I think they do referrals but I don’t want to do that here. They are friendly to transactional mail but will ban you quick for unsolicited commercial mail.
Nice! Thanks for the heads up. I forgot about that deal, I was looking at it in the past for hosting some emails - might pick it up this year for that case. I was not aware of using it for transactional emails. Mxroute is well loved by a lot of users.
You are right - the product itself is new, with the company behind it being nearly 10 years old. I was speaking generally for these kinds of deals - usually it is for new products that are in the early stages. Early startup isn’t the best description for this scenario.
I’ve purchased and connected it to a Staging site, and successfully sent and received the “Get Started” email from Discourse. So far, so good. I’ll follow up here after implementation on my Production site.
I was getting to a new and pricier tier at Mailgun, thus the economics here became very attractive.
I’ve heard the recommendations and the supposed trustworthiness of the founder, but I’d still be reluctant to subscribe.
An ‘80+% off’ sale reminds me of how some providers display their pricing to mask shady practices like overselling.
I was recently looking for a pay-as-you-go plan but didn’t find many options. Mailgun initially hid, then completely removed, their pay-as-you-go “flex” plan. It seems providers aren’t too fond of these plans anymore, often pushing customers toward minimum $15–$20/month subscriptions for sending 10,000–20,000 emails, even when all we need is a few hundred.
Which providers offer plans for less than $5/month besides Amazon SES?
That said, a flat price and single payment for unlimited use is certainly an interesting business choice.
After receiving an email from Mailgun about their upcoming price increase — doubling the Flex plan rate from $1.00 to $2.00 per 1,000 emails — I decided to switch over to Emailit today instead.
A quick note on setup
Overall, the setup was completely smooth. The only issue I ran into was the one discussed in this topic:
530 From header does not match MAIL FROM address
The fix was simple: the “Reply by email address” must not include a prefix like replies+%{reply_key}@mydomain.com.
That pattern caused the error above. I removed the replies+ prefix, and everything started working perfectly.
My working configuration
After adding the DNS records and creating an API key in Emailit:
Just to add info, the deal marketing has a lot to do with how that marketplace itself displays deals.
There are a plethora of ways a purchase like this can go bad, some are:
Product dies.
Product stays alive, but is hardly maintained.
New features or limits are added in the future and are not included with the purchase, then the product slowly becomes less useful over time.
Product has success and is acquired, with purchased plans being dropped off in the process because ‘reasons’.
Any number of sketchy ways to mess with the purchased limits, like increasing credit consumption per action etc.
Deal is simply not honoured in the future.
With this deal, imo, the main costs being risked are:
Time or dev cost for implementing it (and replacing it later if it doesn’t work out)
Any negative consequences due to unexpected issues/bugs
The dollar cost itself is very minimal when compared to other similar monthly/usage billed solutions. So if thinking of it from the perspective of just the product dollar cost, it should be a fairly short amount of time before a buyer is ‘in the green’ compared to other solutions with the same quota. So the risk/reward in that regard is quite good imo, especially considering there is a 60d refund period.
Even a small subscription can add up quick, e.g. 6 EUR (~$7 USD) will end up costing 72 EUR (~$84 USD) annually. Free plans are great, but notorious for getting rug pulled. Due to being free, the provider has minimal obligation to continue providing that free service long term.
A lot of companies do deals like this to get enthusiastic users providing feedback for a young product, finding edge case bugs etc. Basically ensuring their product is battle tested. I think for an ESP that owns their own infrastructure (they have a small datacenter and their own IP block), it’s probably quite a sound strategy.
Don, I’ll be interested to hear if you run into any issues with the new Emailit rate limit of 2msg/sec – or if you know something about how Discourse handles outbound mail that makes this not a concern:
