I got tired of paying more every time my email list grew, so I'm building QeakFlow

Going this narrow is the right call. I sell to the same segment (trades and home services, in Canada) and everything you wrote matches: they don't compare features, they compare 'does this earn me one more job than it costs per month.' The buying trigger is almost never a feature list — it's one specific painful miss they can name. If that holds for German tradespeople too, your best landing copy is probably a story, not a benefits grid. And +1 on ecommerce being a different species — a plumber and a Shopify store share nothing about how they use their inbox.

The pricing frustration is real. Paying more just because the list grew feels like a tax on doing the thing that matters.

BYO SMTP is an interesting wedge too. Control and predictable cost together is clearer than “yet another simpler Mailchimp.”

Main risk I’d watch: “simple email tool” is a crowded shelf. The sharper the buyer (“local businesses who only send monthly newsletters and hate per-subscriber pricing”), the easier this sells.

I built Make it RAIN for creators monetizing products, so I’m biased toward clear ICP early. Flat pricing alone may not be enough without a specific “this is for you” sentence.

If I were beta testing, I’d want to know the exact flat price and what breaks when someone hits 10k subscribers.

This really resonates, I'm building in a totally different category but from the exact same "why am I paying for 40 features to use one" frustration. One thing to watch with flat pricing though: the single huge sender whose volume blows past your flat price while your revenue stays flat, that one case can quietly eat your margin, so a soft cap or a second tier keeps the "predictable price" promise without the downside. Bring-your-own-SMTP is a smart move too, it pushes deliverability cost and sender reputation onto the user, which is exactly how you stay cheap. Who do you picture as the main switcher, someone leaving Mailchimp on price, or someone who never wanted a full suite to begin with?

The predictable-price idea is easy to understand, but “small businesses” can mean very different email habits. Are you looking for your first beta users from one specific group — newsletters, local businesses, or ecommerce stores — or are you deliberately keeping it broad to learn where the frustration is strongest?

I like that you're challenging the pricing model instead of assuming the feature set is the problem.

I'll be interested to see what beta users consistently describe as the reason they switch. That tends to reveal whether the product is really about predictable pricing, sender control, simplicity, or something else entirely.