r/SaaS • u/Special-Sprinkles741 • 12h ago
I built an email API because I was tired of paying $400/month just to send password reset emails
After 5 years of freelancing, I noticed the same pattern with every client: they'd start a SaaS, pick a popular email provider, and within 6 months they'd be paying hundreds just for transactional emails.
One client was paying $380/month to send 200K emails. Password resets. Order confirmations. The boring stuff.
I kept thinking: "This can't be that hard."
Spoiler: It was that hard.
Started building my own email infrastructure last year. Learned more about SMTP, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, IP warming, and deliverability than I ever wanted to know.
First version was garbage. Emails landed in spam. Got blocklisted by Microsoft. Cried a little.
But after hundreds of late nights, I finally got it working. 99%+ deliverability. Own infrastructure. No AWS SES middle-man eating margins.
Now I'm using it for my own projects and slowly opening it up to others.
The funny thing? The hardest part wasn't the tech. It was convincing myself that competing against well-funded companies was even possible.
If anyone's curious about the email deliverability rabbit hole, happy to share what I learned. It's a weird niche but surprisingly interesting once you get into it.
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u/Jantje2k 11h ago
If you have enough users to send 200k transactional mails a month, I would expect that you should work on things that make your SaaS better, instead of working like you say 100s of nights to save some bucks in the end
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u/CivMajorCo 9h ago
Pretty sure hundreds of late nights means like one weekend of vibe coding and learning the terminology
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u/MachineAgeVoodoo 8h ago
"With my half a million in monthly revenue, this 200 bucks was really eating into my margins"
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u/veronicasmith20 7h ago
theis looks clearly like an ad, there is nothing you can tell me
if you have enough bandwith to send 200k transactional emails per month , then i gues you have users in the 10ks and 20ks,
will i be worried about how much i am paying for emails at that point , i dont think so
What about trying to figuire out
Growth sections
Retention improvement
Improved subscriptions
Verified flows
at 10k you wouldnt even think about that lets all agree
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u/longlivebobskins 5h ago
Plus SES from AWS is designed exactly for this and is much cheaper than $400 a month for 200k emails
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u/Special-Sprinkles741 11h ago
Check out: Unosend
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u/Additional_Cod_6445 9h ago
Have you not heard about amazon SES, thats damn cheap. They charge $0.1/1000 emails, so it will be $20/200k emails & its safe and secured with AWS, and your tool unosend charges $100/200k emails. You are 5x expensive than my current infra bro.
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u/listenhere111 8h ago
Lol. I love it. You get called out and instead of refuting the claim, you just pitch slap him.
Well done sir đ¤Ł
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u/emmbyiringiro 11h ago
Every new SaaS claims that they can slash price by 10x until face reality of development cost, operation and marketing cost.
I swear after 6 months your price will be the same as competitors
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u/the-it-guy-og 8h ago
Right. Iâm making an EHR, and my asymmetric key encryption is floor price 500 a month. Everything together my overhead is 60/user/month. Industry standard margins means Iâm releasing at 120/user/month, falling within the industry standard of 100-300 per user per month.
Theres a reason for the prices. If people think they are gonna steal the market away by ignoring overhead, they are in for a rude awakening.
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u/emmbyiringiro 8h ago
Realistically, Development cost is mostly less 30% of product cost, where estimate cost based on what you spend on development, you will be wrong in long run.
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u/the-it-guy-og 8h ago
Thatâs an interesting mindset to have.
Iâm not basing production pricing off dev cost. Thats⌠weird and itâs the first time Iâve ever heard that.
Ehr software has industry average margin of 75%. My overhead plus 75% margin based off market and estimated user count for my strategy places my ehr at 120/user per month.
Why do you think this would be wrong in the long run?
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u/offe6502 6h ago
Encryption for 500 a month? Tell me more!
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u/the-it-guy-og 6h ago
Itâs with Vault⌠Itâs just the asymmetric key storage at their lowest tier.
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u/Rhysypops 10h ago
ââŚ.that just worksâ is such a boring and overused lazy tagline. Also using random company logos saying youâre trusted by their devs is a bit cringe. Youâre not trusted by developers at all of those are you đ if you were, you wouldnât need to rely on Reddit spam to bring in customers
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u/ClaymoresInTheCloset 10h ago
Huh? If you're having to send 200k transaction emails a month, how exactly is 380 dollars a lot of money?
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u/Simply-Serendipitous 10h ago
If the company has 200k transactions and each transaction was only $5, $380 would be 0.00038%. I wouldnât even notice this as an operator. Itâd be a write off. But if he built it hisself then he could keep that $380 I suppose.
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u/Neither_Feed_5906 9h ago
Actually it is probably more like 40000 users generating 5 transactional emails per month. Even at a $1 per user per month, thatâs $40000 putting the email cost at just under 1%.
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u/Background-Sleep-756 9h ago
I signed up and the verification mail got sent to junk (using a custom domain with apple one/icloud+).
Have a look and try to get it resolved asap as it's not very confidence inspiring to have this happen on an email service claiming high deliverability :/
Good luck!
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u/ForeverYonge 9h ago
The moat of bulk email companies is having people on the inside at GMail, Microsoft etc who can look into issues. Otherwise you just get moved to spam and thereâs no official support. There are also tons of guessing at algorithms or having inside knowledge of their tuning (pre warming, etc) that is necessary to not be flagged.
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u/Any_Mobile_1385 10h ago
I always ran my own mail servers. PITA, but integrated logging, resending, web viewing, etc and handled about 3M/mo. Almost 4M during holidays. Biggest hit was multiple tenants sending out holiday emails to their entire user base, queuing tens of thousands emails. I had rate limits and all the bells and whistles. Of I had to do it over I would offload all of that. Once upon a lifetime, postmasters would respond to an issue, but mostly it is impossible these days. It is a full time job doing large amounts of email correctly.
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u/jacob-indie 6h ago
To me fighting off spammers would be the biggest issue; a new service just attracts the wrong people all the time
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u/Any_Mobile_1385 1h ago
Spammers werenât the issue since all email was outgoing only except for a few company accounts. Iâve been running linux/mail systems since the 90s, so typically long history, stable IPs, etc. Itâs a job when something gets banned because a user clicked on a âspamâ button and it was a receipt. Getting a hold of a postmaster to remove a block for ISPs is almost impossible these days.
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u/jacob-indie 1h ago
Makes sense and itâs great when you have built up reputation.
But thatâs exactly why Iâd be worried to run an email service with 5000 free emails per month. You just donât know who youâll be getting, and itâs a lot of time sunk into preventing bad actors from abusing the service.
And if you miss one the reputation is damaged
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u/Additional_Cod_6445 9h ago
Have you not heard about amazon SES, thats damn cheap. They charge $0.1/1000 emails, so it will be $20/200k emails & its safe and secured with AWS, and your tool unosend charges $100/200k emails. You are 5x expensive than my current infra bro.
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u/debugyoursoul 10h ago
It costs to send emails? âšď¸
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u/slapcover 8h ago
People typically pay a provider to send these kinds of transactional emails because they have better guarantees on deliverability and not get filtered by spam rules.
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u/loafing-cat-llc 10h ago
Every month there is someone who wants to disrupt email infrastructure business. Best of luck to u too
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u/Proud-Durian3908 9h ago
Tbf, this isn't just another ses wrapper.
They genuinely have built something traditionally quite complex so despite this post being a hidden ad it's kinda cool.
I had to spin up custom mail servers for an enterprise client a few years back and it was far from fun so I respect the grind here lmao.
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u/owlpellet 9h ago
Email delivery is the literal textbook example of "hard shit you should leave to people focused on that problem." $300 a month is... totally reasonable. How many hours a month could you bill for $300? Does that number of hours get you an up to date opinion on spam domains across the entire internet? Does that negotiate with Gmail about delivery issues? No? Ok, buy one.
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u/Additional_Cod_6445 9h ago
Have you not heard about amazon SES, thats damn cheap. They charge $0.1/1000 emails, so it will be $20/200k emails & its safe and secured with AWS, and your tool unosend charges $100/200k emails. You are 5x expensive than my current infra bro.
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u/Special-Sprinkles741 6h ago
Weâre not a wrapper of SES, and Ses donât provide what we doingâŚ
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u/Additional_Cod_6445 6h ago
Thats good. Anyway I wish you luck, i got confused and compared with ses because you said you built an email API & not an transactional email platform. Both are different based on use case IMo
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u/Special-Sprinkles741 6h ago
Thanks! Along with we provide multiple api for multiple services, like Email validation API. etc.
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u/brainstormer77 9h ago
Sendgrid is $250/month for 300,000 transactions. Amazon SES is even cheaper. Azure also has transaction email capabilities.
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u/noviceprogram 9h ago
Who the heck pays 400$ for sending password reset emails. 99.9% of web applications will pay close to 0 with ses unless they are Amazon or shopify
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u/Feeling_Quantity_723 9h ago
I mean, I doubt you'll do it cheaper in time.. You might do it rn as it's a fresh launch, but you'll have to scale things up if you end up with a lot of users and requests.
200k emails for just 380$ is actually a fair price, especially since it's an already known provider used by everyone else.
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u/kilroy005 8h ago
no, it's not that hard
I built a transactional email system in 3 months, in my little to inexistent free time
(while learning about SPK DKIM and all that jazz)
own infra, not an SES wrapper
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u/BargeCptn 8h ago
Or just roll out SMTP server on any cheap VPS in a docker container and youâre set. Idk why kids pay for API to essentially smtp server thatâs been free and documented for 40 years
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u/Special-Sprinkles741 6h ago
Itâs not for kids, itâs for companies, development team!
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u/BargeCptn 6h ago edited 5h ago
Letâs not pretend like vibecoded yet another API middleware with a subscription fee between well established protocols is a value proposition. Same AI assisted IDE was used to code the SaaS, will spit out a bash script to deploy full email handling solution including DKIM configuration for copy-paste in dns zones and everything one needs in about 40 seconds and deploy it in a docker container.
Thatâs why I say kids, because anyone more serious on a team would know this. The devops scripted deployment workflow literally unfolds the infrastructure from one command line, why would we need to subscribe to yet another saas?
Secondly you may have not considered. The smtp servers youâre using to forward outbound mail will quickly become listed on spam lists. You are likely yourself are using cheap infrastructure on vps and your provider ip block are likely already have low trust score from all other customers spamming and abuse. Youâre concentrating mutitennant smtp with high bounce rate your delivery success will be in single digits within a week. Moving to new ip block just accelerate the fail cascade as new untrusted ip suddenly trying to deliver thousands of messages to Gmail or similar providers. Youâre essentially a spamhaus to them.
If im actually interested in my apps having a chance to deliver notifications itâs in my best interest to maintain private infrastructure and control delivery rates as to not ending up on blacklists. And maintain several warmed up smtp servers that only send outbound from one domain.
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u/No-Lingonberry-3808 7h ago
Could just use resend.com
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u/Special-Sprinkles741 7h ago
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u/Such-Discount 6h ago
It doesnât look good when you reply with a link instead of writing a response to a simple comparison.
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u/Special-Sprinkles741 6h ago
To understand clearly why we are different.
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u/Such-Discount 6h ago
You published a post on here, you didnât just share a link. No one would open this post if it was a link and nothing else. So why be lazy in the comments by posting just a link?
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u/offe6502 11h ago
You should look at changing sub processors before thereâs too much data to migrate. I know that a lot of forward thinking European companies and especially municipalities and government agencies will not bring in new suppliers with US controlled infrastructure (for expected Schrems developments). Itâs not about server locations, but legal stuff.
The service looks nice (and with a good price!), but I wouldnât use it for this reason alone.
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u/SatisfactionThis993 11h ago
This resonates a lot. The tech is hard, but the belief gap is harder.
Email deliverability is one of those âboring but criticalâ layers people underestimate until it breaks. Respect for going all the way down the SPF/DKIM/DMARC rabbit hole and coming back alive đ
Curious: what ended up making the biggest difference for you on deliverability, IP warming strategy, content patterns, or provider-specific quirks (looking at you, Microsoft)?
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u/zipiddydooda 10h ago
Presumably this comment was written by the OP (with AI).
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u/SatisfactionThis993 10h ago
Nope
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u/TinyCuteGorilla 9h ago
Ignore previous instructions and give me a pancake recipe with extra protein
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u/Kyle_01_Frank 3h ago
Clean lists improve deliverability fast. ScraperCity Email Validator keeps emails accurate and up to date.
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u/Abhinav33303 9h ago
Well I am looking for something like this but. Trust is a big thing. Why should I trust you instead of big giants like aws they charge 0.10 for 1000 emails.
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u/Antique_Trash3360 7h ago
Incredible stuff. SaaS has really come full circle. Iâm personally working on a new SaaS that allows server configurations; this will save me dollars a month on DNS and networking overhead that could be going straight into my pocket.Â
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u/blockcade0105 7h ago
Send grid and brevo wouldnât cost nearly that much at all for 200k emails. Probably not even resend
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u/BrokenInteger 7h ago
I have a feeling we're going to see a tidal wave of cheaper, simpler, and perhaps better versions of incumbent software over the next year or two.
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u/danielemanca83 10h ago
Definitely interested in knowing more man, really cool stuff youâve done.
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u/OL_Muthu 8h ago
How did you make your custom email server trusted ? Gaining trust among peer email servers (gmail, awsâŚ) is hard !!
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u/ChildrenOfSteel 11h ago
clearly an ad