4 ms·

Ask HN: Affordable SMTP / Email Sender

4 points by xgbi 6y ago

I own a small company where we monitor fridges and launch alert emails & SMS when a threshold is reached. We send about 1 mail per day, with bursts to 10-50 if there are alerts to send, but this is a very small amount of mail. I tried the free sendgrid offer, but their IP is blacklisted with spamhaus... Their pro offer is more than $20/month which is way above our hosting costs. Considering that we only send a very few amount of mails, do you know of a reputable SMTP/email sender that could be affordable for us ? Say, no more than $5 / month?

jmkr 6y ago
https://mxroute.com/ https://mxroute.com/ 100$ lifetime, 360 outbound/hour. Or you could go with a yearly rate. Might want to read the terms of service for your usecase, but it works for me with low traffic and multiple boxes/accounts.
enz 6y ago
AWS SES has a plain SMTP interface and it works fine for low volume (rare notification emails in our case)
chovybizzass 6y ago
mailgun is free. twilio is very cheap for sms.
- xgbi 6y ago
  Does mailgun have a trusted IP from where I can send emails? Sendgrid is about the same: you get a free slot for 100 mails/day but the IP is blacklisted by spamhaus so it has no use to me :/ If mailgun has the same issue, it might not be worth it. Anybody has an experience with Mailgun's free tier? I'd be happy to pay on the order of $1 or $2 per month for my usage and be sure to send emails without issues.
  - sdevonoes 6y ago
    I never heard of Mailgun having such issues. Previous company I was working for (medium size ecommerce platform) was delivering thousands of emails/day via Mailgun without problems. Not using their free tier though, but paying.
    - xgbi 6y ago
      Yep this is the issue: Sendgrid offers "well-seen" ips in their pro tier at 50$/month or so, which is 10 times what we spend on hosting..
varun1505 6y ago
You can probably use GMail SMTP?
p0d 6y ago
My business has been using a Gmail account for email registrations etc for many years. I think the Gmail limit is 500 per hour.
Irongirl1 6y ago
AWS SES with sendy.com as your interface, maybe?

4 points by xgbi 6y ago

jmkr 6y ago

https://mxroute.com/ https://mxroute.com/ 100$ lifetime, 360 outbound/hour. Or you could go with a yearly rate. Might want to read the terms of service for your usecase, but it works for me with low traffic and multiple boxes/accounts.

enz 6y ago

AWS SES has a plain SMTP interface and it works fine for low volume (rare notification emails in our case)

chovybizzass 6y ago

mailgun is free. twilio is very cheap for sms.

xgbi 6y ago
Does mailgun have a trusted IP from where I can send emails? Sendgrid is about the same: you get a free slot for 100 mails/day but the IP is blacklisted by spamhaus so it has no use to me :/ If mailgun has the same issue, it might not be worth it. Anybody has an experience with Mailgun's free tier? I'd be happy to pay on the order of $1 or $2 per month for my usage and be sure to send emails without issues.
- sdevonoes 6y ago
  I never heard of Mailgun having such issues. Previous company I was working for (medium size ecommerce platform) was delivering thousands of emails/day via Mailgun without problems. Not using their free tier though, but paying.
  - xgbi 6y ago
    Yep this is the issue: Sendgrid offers "well-seen" ips in their pro tier at 50$/month or so, which is 10 times what we spend on hosting..

varun1505 6y ago

You can probably use GMail SMTP?

p0d 6y ago

My business has been using a Gmail account for email registrations etc for many years. I think the Gmail limit is 500 per hour.

Irongirl1 6y ago

AWS SES with sendy.com as your interface, maybe?