Looking for PAYG or low-priced email sending service

I'm looking for a provider with an email sending service for sending out transactional emails (login verification, password resets, payment reminders) with good deliverability and preferably something that allows me to pay based on usage or otherwise has a low monthly commit.

I'm aware of Postmark and its stellar deliverability, but having to pay $10/mo when I'd only send something like 3000 emails seems a bit pricey. Amazon SES seems to have a reputation for sending lots of spam and has deliverability issues.

Maybe folks around here have a better recommendation?

(Yes, and don’t mind me cross posting stuff on OGF. I’d like to be more active here, but sadly, OGF still has more folks visiting it.)

Comments

  • MasonMason AdministratorOG

    We switched LES outgoing emails to Amazon SES a good while ago and haven't had any issues with deliverability (at least, nothing reported to me directly in the past year). Just set up all the goodies (spf, dkim, dmarc) and you should be good.

    Only pain point in the whole process was getting "permission" to use our SES sub in production outside of their sandbox. Smooth sailing ever since. Pricing is competitive.

    Humble janitor of LES
    Proud papa of YABS

  • I have been with Mailgun for years now and didn't experience any issues so far.
    In the lowest tier ("Trial"), you get a free volume of 5000 mails / month and 1$ / 1000 mails if you exceed that.

  • Another alternative is socketlabs...

  • @Bochi said:
    I have been with Mailgun for years now and didn't experience any issues so far.
    In the lowest tier ("Trial"), you get a free volume of 5000 mails / month and 1$ / 1000 mails if you exceed that.

    This is for the first three months only, right? Is there a way to not pay up $35/mo as I won’t be using up all those 50,000 emails?

  • Is mxroute ok for this?

    Thanked by (2)bikegremlin alento
  • +1 for Amazon SES. I've been using them to send 10K+ emails a month to a double opt-in list and deliverability has been great. Open rates are even better than I was using Mailchimp, for a fraction of the price.

  • +1 for SES as long as you can keep the bounce rate under certain limits, you are good to go.
    One time I passed that threshold, and my account got locked, but they removed the lock after I create ticket support.

    Another limitation, they don't have a dashboard to monitor SES bounce, usages, etc. Need to code it ourselves using their API

  • https://www.mail.baby

    $1/Month
    20 cents/Every 1000 Mails

    Thanked by (3)Talistech Logano caracal
  • edited June 2022

    We use SES at work (both my current and former jobs), never had any deliverability issues with neither B2C nor B2B emails.

    Contribute your idling VPS/dedi (link), Android (link) or iOS (link) devices to medical research

  • @stevewatson301 said:
    This is for the first three months only, right? Is there a way to not pay up $35/mo as I won’t be using up all those 50,000 emails?

    Well, very good questions - I completely missed that statement on the page!
    As said, I am with them for very long now, so maybe I am still on some kind of grandfathered plan?

    However, this is what they state on the sign-up page:
    "After your trial, you will be moved to the Foundation 50k, but you can always select pay-as-you-go or a different plan of your choice."

    And in the overview within an account they list this "Flex Pay As You Go" plan:

    And I really hope this is a typo, as 1$/mail would be on the higher end! :D

  • MasonMason AdministratorOG

    @Bochi said:

    @stevewatson301 said:
    This is for the first three months only, right? Is there a way to not pay up $35/mo as I won’t be using up all those 50,000 emails?

    Well, very good questions - I completely missed that statement on the page!
    As said, I am with them for very long now, so maybe I am still on some kind of grandfathered plan?

    However, this is what they state on the sign-up page:
    "After your trial, you will be moved to the Foundation 50k, but you can always select pay-as-you-go or a different plan of your choice."

    And in the overview within an account they list this "Flex Pay As You Go" plan:

    And I really hope this is a typo, as 1$/mail would be on the higher end! :D

    Looks like one can still sign up for the Flex Pay as you Go, but you have to sign up for the foundation trial and then downgrade before the trial ends.

    I have one of these accounts as well for some personal stuff and always stay under the 1k emails/mo free quota.

    Humble janitor of LES
    Proud papa of YABS

  • @willie said:
    Is mxroute ok for this?

    As long as you're not sending insane amounts of emails, MX route is great for this.
    They do have a hard limit of 300 emails/hour.

    @AaronSS said:
    https://www.mail.baby

    $1/Month
    20 cents/Every 1000 Mails

    +1

    Thanked by (1)bikegremlin
  • I've tried the free tiers from many providers:

    • Mailgun. OK, but lots of spam (in fact, we score them down for incoming mail).
    • Sendgrid. Avoid, even worse!
    • SocketLabs. One of the best free tiers. We use this for a lot of transactional stuff. Some issues with Hotmail and Apple (iCloud).
    • MXRoute. Generally good, but not set up for the sort of analytics/delivery reports that a sending service gives.
    • AWS (not free, though costs us very little). We find this has the best deliverability, but horrible to get any type of info out of it.
    • Others we tried briefly but didn't like.

    In the end we use several to get the best deliverability, like SocketLabs by default, MXRoute for Apple stuff, AWS for Hotmail, etc.

  • tjntjn
    edited June 2022

    Off-topic, but if anyone is looking for reports/analytics for SES - check out https://github.com/Nikeev/sesdashboard
    I've been using it for a while now, it's pretty good.

  • nullroutenullroute Hosting Provider

    @AaronSS said:
    https://www.mail.baby

    $1/Month
    20 cents/Every 1000 Mails

    MailBaby sucks, I don't know how anyone would be able to use that. It's really impossible to have deliverability in outlook or email marketing.

    https://purplehost.com.br - Reliable, secure and affordable game hosting.

  • tjntjn
    edited June 2022

    Don't mail.baby just use MailChannels? Or is that their fallback?

  • Zepto is pretty reliable!

    I sometimes worry that I'm so correct in all I say, that there might be something wrong with me

  • @nullroute said:

    @AaronSS said:
    https://www.mail.baby

    $1/Month
    20 cents/Every 1000 Mails

    MailBaby sucks, I don't know how anyone would be able to use that. It's really impossible to have deliverability in outlook or email marketing.

    Not affiliated with them or anything, but would like to hear what kind of problems you had. I personally used them for a while, and everything worked fine (except for forwarded emails going to GMail's promotions tab for some reason).

    @tjn said:
    Don't mail.baby just use MailChannels? Or is that their fallback?

    Mailbaby has their own IP ranges. I'm not 100% sure, but from my testings, it seems like they will calculate spam score based on the message, and if the message goes over some kind of threshold, they will pass it through Mailchannels.

    Thanked by (1)tjn
  • InternxtInternxt Services Provider

    @nullroute said:
    MailBaby sucks, I don't know how anyone would be able to use that. It's really impossible to have deliverability in outlook or email marketing.

    Had tested briefly, our experience was opposite, it was able to deliver anything, even spam was delivered and was mostly delivered right. I think they use mailchannels as failover.

    Internxt.com - Zero Knowledge End to End Encryption - Privacy Focused Cloud Storage
    Internxt Send - Encrypt and send files in total privacy

Sign In or Register to comment.

This Site is currently in maintenance mode.
Please check back here later.

→ Site Settings