We do in fact support SMTP - we'll work to make that more prominent. And I understand your take on the subscription model - we're chewing on some pay-for-use models.
In my experience everyone appreciates lower prices - and good senders should be rewarded with lower prices.
If you allow spammers on your network things get a lot more expensive. So you can't offer low prices and allow low-quality senders. That's why we have a strict AUP and aggressive measures to detect spammers, phishers, and non-permission (aka cold-outreach) messages.
Most do have email industry expertise. But for whatever reason email infrastructure expertise seems to be a dying breed with most providers pushing their infrastructure into major cloud providers. It has its benefits, but its costs too - and those get passed on to you. Our background has been in email infrastructure (managing it ourselves instead of paying a 3rd party to do it and sticking you with the bill).
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- Pricing wins against pretty much any provider (and is an order of magnitude lower than many incumbents).
- Especially when compared to SES, we're a dev-friendly, fully modern sending platform and we don't require you to glue a bunch of services together.
- We're self funded from previous acquisitions in the space. We're focused on good customer outcomes instead of investor outcomes.
- We have a pretty cool templating platform that allows you to write simple markdown instead of convoluted email-compatible HTML.
Agreed. Our team's background is in deliverability. Our last startup was a deliverability company founded in 2014, grew to ~20,000 paying customers, and sold in 2020 so we know the space very well and have built Anypost around those best practices. Also happy to provide guidance to anyone who needs help with it. I can go into any specifics if interested.
We think it's too damn expensive to send email these days. We built Anypost on modern (non-cloudy) infrastructure to ensure we can offer a top-shelf product without having to hit you with the cloud tax. We're not looking to be the next unicorn. We just want a sustainable product that helps solopreneurs and high-volume senders get their message out without having to worry about the bill.
It uses MJML under the hood to ensure email-safe HTML is generated. That should prevent many edge cases where failures can happen - but I'm sure there are some skeletons we'll have to find / fix.
FWIW We're switching to Sparkpost (I'm not affiliated with Sparkpost). They do the transactional email for the big dogs like Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, etc and have a pretty simple UI. Just throwing that out there for all the fellow Mandrill refugees.