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Ask HN: Affordable SMTP / Email Sender

4 points by xgbi ↗ HN
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?

9 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 25.9 ms ] thread
chovybizzass
mailgun is free. twilio is very cheap for sms.
xgbi
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
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
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
You can probably use GMail SMTP?
jmkr
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
AWS SES has a plain SMTP interface and it works fine for low volume (rare notification emails in our case)
p0d
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
AWS SES with sendy.com as your interface, maybe?