Every often i keep seeing a post to the tune of .....
"My 'Email Service Provider' has increased prices. What do i do now"?
Here's why this is happening.
A lot of consolidation has happened in the email industry over the last few years. Most of the better Email Service Providers (ESP's) have been acquired.
- Sendgrid has been acquired by Twilio
- Mailgun has been acquired by Sinch
- Mailchimp has been acquired by Intuit
- Postmark has been acquired by ActiveCampaign
..... and so on.
The result, more often than not, has been a rent-seeking-behavior on part of these (and other) ESP's. Free plans have gone away or have been tweaked and you are forced to pay more for nothing extra in return. You are in a hostage situation.
Here's what i suggest you must do.
You should start using AWS SES.
The knight in shining armor has always been AWS SES. They have had the same price sine a looong time - $1 per 10,000 emails.
I'm not asking you to move lock-stock-barrel to SES.
NO.
Start to look at AWS SES as your Plan-B.
Start by using SES as your secondary email service provider. Move a tiny part of your transactional and/or marketing workloads to SES. Keep doing this over a period of a few months till AWS SES becomes your primary ESP.
It's free to open an AWS account and takes a tiny effort to get production access to SES.
There's three ways you can start this process.
Direct integration with AWS SES: I would recommend this if you are a Developer and have mostly transactional email needs. AWS SES API is quite comprehensive. The documentation is exhaustive and you should be able to figure things out with minimal effort. This will cost you almost ZERO, apart from your time and effort. Even if you have high volumes SES is just $1 per 10,000 emails.
Use a cloud SaaS that integrates with AWS SES: There are quite a few out there. I would recommend SENDUNE (https://sendune.com) for its overall simplicity, ease of use, and generous free tier. The paid plan is a low $24 per month for 250,000 emails.
Self host an email application that hooks into SES: This is the best option if you are familiar launching and managing servers. Again, there are quite a few software's available here. I would recommend Sendy (https://sendy.co). You can start with EC2 or a DigitalOcean droplet and scale according to your needs.
If you do not like any of the above options, just do an online search. There are other services that let you use AWS SES to send emails. Choose one and get started today.
You will thank me in a couple of months.
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