Show HN: Helo – An email API from former Postmark folks (helohq.com)

1 points by Archanian ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm Ryan, engineer and co-founder at Helo (https://www.helohq.com) - an email API for sending transactional and marketing email from your application: password resets, receipts, notifications, newsletters, etc.

Most of our team worked together at Postmark for many years, so we know what it takes to build a reliable email service. If you've ever loved a product and then watched it get acquired, you probably know the rest of that story. We started Helo to keep building the kind of product we're good at, improve on what we have learned, take good care of our customers, and stay independent while doing it. We're bootstrapped and plan to stay that way.

Helo covers everything you'd expect from a developer-focused email service:

- REST API and SMTP, with SDKs for Ruby, JS, C#, Python and Go (more to come) - Separate infrastructure for transactional and broadcast mail - Event logs, stats, webhooks, suppressions, unsubscribes, flexible permissions - Usage-based pricing with no arbitrary feature gates - https://www.helohq.com/pricing

Beyond the fundamentals, we've also put a lot of work into multi-tenant sending. When you're a platform sending on behalf of your own customers, you need to keep one bad sender from hurting everyone's deliverability, let customers send from their own domains, and keep stats and unsubscribes separate per customer.

We've built Helo to address all of these concerns, while also allowing flexibility in how the relationships between domains, webhooks, credentials, etc. are defined amongst your tenants. For example, you can share one verified domain across all your customers while letting a few use their own, send all events to one webhook or split them per tenant, and give tenants isolated credentials with permissions limited to exactly what they need.

If you've built multi-tenant sending before, what was most painful? Is there something you wish your email provider handled for you but doesn't? I'd love to hear about it.

6 comments

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Bettina here, another Helo team member. Who doesn't love a second shot at something that was already fun the first time around? Happy to answer any questions alongside Ryan.
Props for taking another shot at this problem. Confused a bit about the pricing, are the in free 1,000 email in total or per month? After that it's $5 per month? And pay per email?
When you initially sign up your account with be in an evaluation mode where you can only send to your own domains. In this mode you get a total of 1,000 emails. This allotment is intended for testing the product. Those don't renew, but if you run out you're welcome to email us for more. Once you sign up for a paid plan you'll be able to send to any domain. At that point you pay $5/month plus $0.00035 per email. So if you send 10k emails you would pay $8.50. If you were to cancel your paid plan, your account would go back into test mode and your testing allotment (whatever was left from before) would be available again. Let me know if that doesn't make sense!

- Jimmy

Hey, congrats on the launch! If several tenants share a verified domain, how do you detect and contain one tenant’s poor sending before it affects the others deliverability?
Great question! We achieve this by using a top-level grouping mechanism for all mail sent through Helo (called "Channels"). Every message sent must be associated with a Channel, and this is typically how you would organise your tenants (one per Channel).

This allows us to track deliverability signals separately for each tenant, regardless of the sending domain they happen to be using. When we see signs of suspicious behaviour or poor sending practices (ie. bounces, spam complaints), we can pause sending for individual tenants before they cause problems for the entire set of senders using that domain (and the platform as a whole).