Just over two months ago, we shared our open source HTML email designer here and it very quickly hit the front-page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41007403.
Here's some backstory.
The open source email designer was the foundation and core part of an internal tool we started way back in 2014 to help our clients leverage the reliability and cost benefits of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). In 2018 we made this tool public - calling it 'Send With SES'. In 2024 we renamed it SENDUNE (https://sendune.com/). This was partly to avoid infringing on the word "SES".
If you are a startup, (or any tech-based company for that matter), chances are your entire tech stack is on AWS but you are not using AWS SES. Instead you use a third party email service like Mailchimp or SendGrid. Why is that the case? AWS SES has the same reliability and deliverability as any other email service. And it comes at a price point too good to ignore. So why does SES not have 'top-of-mind' recall when it comes to email.
There are a few reasons we know of;
- AWS SES is hard to get started with. You need to get out of the sandbox first. - There's pages and pages of documentation to deal with. - There's no contact/subscriber management. - You cannot design email templates. - Expensive add-ons (delivery dashboard/virtual deliverability manager).
Is there a way to overcomes these hurdles? YES. That's where SENDUNE comes in.
SENDUNE abstracts away all the complexity of sending emails with AWS SES. What you get is a highly reliable way to deliver all your transactional and marketing emails at a fraction of the cost. We have clients who have created email templates for signups and password resets many years ago and haven't touched them since. It is that reliable.
SENDUNE offers a market-leading free plan, and the paid plan costs a lot lesser than any alternative. To be clear, this is not a price play. Email is the basic plumbing of the internet. It's a 'solved problem' and should not be expensive. Every email service provider in this line of business has become a 'rent-seeker', locking you in and charging you more as your subscriber base grows, while providing no additional value.
A small team of four full-stackers keep SENDUNE up and running. Most of us have been wrangling code for the last 15 years or so. More than knowing what to do, we know what not to do - a perk of having donkey's years behind us. This helps us keep server costs significantly low even while still meeting 99.95% uptime SLA's.
We do not carry the burden of venture capital. We have no growth targets or milestones to hit, which gives us immense independence to run SENDUNE in a way that puts our users first. We believe this is the main reason SENDUNE has survived for so long, and we intend to keep it that way.
Will be here for a while. AMA.