Ask IH: What service do you use for transactional emails?
I was a big fan of customer.io but as they stopped their freemium offer, I have a hard time finding any analog solution. Ideally, I look for a system with an online template system, what do you think?
I have used Mandrill, SendGrid, Amazon SES and Sendinblue, but now I use sparkpost.com - I think they sponsored in one of the IH podcasts.
They offer 100,000 emails per month for free, and you can use the free plan without a credit card.
Never heard about it, thanx. But all those emails service looks the same, and from my point of view they seems so basic and useless. User centric approach brought by customer.io, getvero.com (and probably intercom which I never tried) bring so much more to the table. As I previously used segments and events to implement complex automation like reminder emails, everything else seems now outdated and tasteless.
Yeah, they are all basically SMTP as a service.
Sometimes we just need to send one-off automated emails like, email verification, notification, daily reports, etc. which are no marketing interest.
I'm no expert in this field but there seems to be a spectrum from purely transactional email to marketing email. For instance, MailChimp spun off Mandrill as a subdivision (and re-acquired).
What you seem to be interested is something in the middle. I used Intercom when they were in beta, and it was great. Never tried Customer.io or Vero but it seems that there's a lot of competition in the field.
I guess it depends if you mean transactional or lifecycle/marketing emails?
For transactional emails, the best I've come across (hands down) is https://postmarkapp.com. Amazing service, and even if they don't have a free plan they are far cheaper at larger scales (at least for the numbers I was working with for https://doorbell.io).
But, they won't let you send lifecycle/marketing emails through their platform, hence why I was asking what types of emails you'll be sending!
https://www.mailjet.com/ is good and they also include a newsletter sending system.
I've use www.mailgun.com before w/o problems (10K emails free every month). Also used www.sendy.co that's super cost effective, if you don't mind the sight hassle to setup and maintain.
I use Amazon SES.
My use case in CTX (enterprise-class search for digital teams, https://getctx.io ) is mostly user account creation and adding / inviting new users to your team.
Working well for me.
Sendgrid works perfectly for us at Nicgrade. Great documentation, fast support, rich functionality.
I'm still with Mandrill, but I wouldn't stay with them if I didn't also use Mailchimp. They require a mailchimp paid account now.
I like the service though and only a few of the big providers support templates, incoming email parsing and using the same vendor for bulk emailing. Sendgrid and Mailgun were on my short list, but a few features of both Mandrill and Mailchimp kept me from straying.
My choice is http://www.mandrill.com/. It's very easy to setup and use. Every month you got 2000 transactional emails on free plan.