I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.
Thinking of "email delivery as a commodity" is the first mistake people make - all ESPs are not created equal. If this were the case, there would not be such a huge variance in not only getting to the Inbox, but how fast you get to the Inbox. This is why we've focused on transactional only, knowing fully well we will grow slower as a business (and why we are more expensive), but have superior delivery since transactional email has a much higher engagement rate and reputation with ISPs.
The entire idea of "dumb pipe" or "commodity" needs to go away. There is a reason why companies like Asana, Desk, and Minecraft chose Postmark, since their email is critical to their business and choosing the right providers makes a real difference. Now, if your emails are not critical, I can see how any service might work. I have yet to come across a product owner who is comfortable letting their customers wait for their transactional emails though - no matter the size of product or company.
Full disclosure, I'm the founder of Postmark - the best "dumb pipe commodity" money can buy.
SparkPost/MessageSystems claims to have the highest inbox rate in the space, and their customer list backs this up. It's much more impressive than Asana, Desk, and Minecraft (think LinkedIn, Facebook, Zillow, Pinterest, etc).
They absolutely recognize that ESPs are a commodity, even reselling delivery to ExactTarget, Responsys, etc, as the "pipe". It's hard to believe your reasoning when the industry leader is saying something different.
LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc do not use Sparkpost, they use their on-premise installable software that many ESPs use and pay tens or hundreds of thousands for, which indeed is a dumb pipe MTA. Those big companies still have a full-time staff managing delivery and infrastructure. It's basically a replacement to Postfix, not a full fledge, multi-datacenter, multi-tenant hosted application to support many thousands of concurrent customers.
A hosted "product" is a different animal. Sure, it needs to have great delivery, but the work that goes into making it easy to troubleshoot when you have issues, minimize developer work, and bring useful data back into your application is something else. This only becomes painfully obvious when you deeply rely on email for your business.
There is a reason why Sparkpost left Postmark out of their comparison. We have the same data sources (eData), and we came out on top.
If you want to enjoy SendGrid deliverability but a different interface, check us out: sendwithus.com
We're designed as a higher level on top of email deliverability, offering some pretty rich features (email storing, great A/B testing, drip campaigns...)
Hey folks, cofounder of Sendwithus.com here -- we're a layer on top of Mandrill, SendGrid, Sparkpost, etc. You can hot swap backends with us, making a change trivial. We're also experts on all these platforms so can advice cost vs support.
Hit our support team (support@sendwithus.com) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.
Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me: matt@sendwithus.com
I opened your features page, everything looks good...
I open your pricing page, and you've lost me as a customer.
Sorry... But you're using the same "$X = Y recipients per month" crap that seems to have lead to MailChimp pulling this shit will Mandrill.
I use Mandrill because they are the closest to usage based pricing (and yes I know there is the 100% DIY route with something like SES on AWS, but that's a different tool for a different job) effectively charging me per email. I want usage pricing. If you don't offer that, you aren't really serving the same market as Mandrill was. (I'm going to refer to them in past tense since Mandrill is dead to me.)
> Every Mandrill account comes with 2,000 free trial sends.
> Once you’ve finished your free trial, it’s $9.95/month for 25,000 emails.
> After that, we charge on a per-thousand-email basis.
> Since we build discounts into our payment structure,
> your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email.
>
> $9.95 up to 25k emails per month
> $0.20/thousand next 1m emails per month
> $0.15/thousand next 5m emails per month
> $0.10/thousand remaining emails
> Add a dedicated IP for $29.95 / month.
Old Mandrill pricing: $10 + $X per email (with volume discounts)
New Mandrill pricing: $X per Y emails
MailChimp pricing: $X per Y emails per Z recipients per month
Sendwithus (You) pricing: $X per Y email recipients per month
Sorry, you look nice and all, but your pricing model is just more of the same.
That's fair feedback (pricing is per recipient), but it reflects the cost of running our service (we store data about your customers long term, which adds up more than the cost of each individual send).
I'd be very surprised if running the database to store that information is the major cost for running the service, and at any rate I'd say your pricing should be a good match for the value you provide to customers, not your costs for providing that value.
I've been considering using your service for a while and it would be useful for us, but I couldn't justify paying what it'd cost us to use it.
I'm interested in your experience with AWS SES. Do you see this as a viable alternative? It is just more complex than Mandrill and other competitors are?
We do this (Sendwithus.com) -- not only see email with all personalization, but see it on the device a customer used (was the link really broken on an iPhone?)
Thanks, but your pricing model is all wrong when it comes to transactional emails. We're looking for something which is more usage based instead of based on number of subscribers. Nice templating though.
Matt here, Sendwithus founder -- Live Chat is great, but it's really important to consider that most of the "big hacks" in the news are the result of social engineering.
I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.