I had a really interesting time trying to inform all the
@RepoPrompt customer about the business wind down this week.
The state of email sending is terrible.
My setup required two things:
1. An initial email for a claim form
2. A follow up email to deliver eligible credit codes
The catch is that I also needed to coordinate the initial email with my cancellation emails from
@polar_sh so I wanted everything to land cleanly. Their api is lovely btw!
After reading
@levelsio ‘s recent post on sending emails as an indie hacker, I decided to try using his low level recs.
1. Started with Amazon SES. After having codex computer use run through insane hoops to configure things, I was blocked because I needed a human to review my usecase. It took 48 hours to get a response and they wanted more info about my usecase, even though my message was clear. This was after being a customer with them for well over a year.
2. Second attempt was
@Cloudflare’s new beta email sending service. Super cheap at $5/mo usage.
This one was actually more dangerous.
It actually worked pretty easily. I was up and running within minutes, and decided to go ahead with it.
Note that it still required some configuration that I had no idea how to do, but codex with chrome use got it handled easily. (Aws took codex 10x as long).
I started sending emails with some throttled sends. Things were looking good.
After about 20 min, at roughly 950 emails sent, I get a rate limit block.
I think, ok, sure I’m sending too fast.
No, I hit an arbitrary monthly limit that wasn’t clearly labelled in the docs. The only way to raise the limit is to fill a long Google form, that requires human review on some unknown time scale.
Well shit. Now a bunch of people received a cancellation email, without any explanation, and people who had gotten the first email and completed the form were not getting their codes.
So now the only option was to use yet another service.
I wanted to avoid paying a high monthly fee for this one time event, that may drag on for months in low volume, but I had no choice because everyone else blocked me.
I was also now stuck in a panic because at this point, some customers had received their claims email, but most had not. All of them had received their polar cancellations email though.
So I switched to
@resend and you know what, as expensive as it is, it actually worked. I didn’t need to talk to a human, and $20/mo let me reach all my customers without any hassle.
This one I could also setup with 2 clicks in a nice ui. Their onboarding is very slick.
I had codex once again update all email sending code and deploy an update to my cloudflare worker for the claim confirmation sender.
I get why these big companies make it hard to mass email, but when you have a customer base you have to reach, the options are actually a lot more limited than they seem.
So yeah, you may be tempted to save money and skip using a Saas like resend, but it turns out there’s a lot more risk in hitting poorly defined rate limits that can cause you far more trouble as a result.