Show HN: I built Mailhub – A scalable API for sending emails with ease not tears

As Ops person responsible for email at my company, I looked it over. We are not coming off SendGrid so I'm not your customer. I didn't make an account but just looked over the documentation. Here my initial thoughts.

First thought, UI looks great. Better than I've dealt with. However, this awesome UI information needs API desperately. While you are working on this API, please make a reporting API key only.

Pricing isn't ideal. I get wanting simpler pricing and initial X per month with Y Limit is great starter but being able to buy in utilization as an option after that point is better.

Premium having no daily limit will bite you. Telling you now, someone will sign up with stolen credit card, spam like hell and you will be left with clean up. Been there, done that.

Lack of SMTP Client support means it's nonstarter for us. While most of our apps use SendGrid API to send email, we have some SMTP legacy lying around.

to field in your API being string or string[] is frustrating. I'm sure it helps with onboarding, but I've found weakly typed fields always bite in the end.

You got a misspelling in Premium: "For all needs, all teams & all *projets*"

The pricing info is confusing and maybe inaccurate(?)

It says:

Up to 500 emails / month 100 tests emails/month | 50 emails/day 100 test emails/day 50 emails/day

That's a bunch of conflicting info. I'm not sure what the actual limits are.

It also says "Remove watermark" in the free tier, but "No watermark" in the paid tier... what's the difference between those? Seems like you can have no watermark in either tier?

Finally, do you use dedicated IP addresses for sending? If so, how do you keep your IP reputation clean? What if a spammer signs up and sends thousands of spam emails - will my email sends also be affected because we share the same IP?

Very stupid question and I apologize if I sound like a nitpicker but I had to ask There are like 10000 email guys out there. Mailgun, Mailchimp, Sendgrid, Mail this, Mail that. What made you build another email sender and how is your offering any different from what these guys are doing?

Did you build an api or a server with an api?

Up to 500 emails / month

100 tests emails/month | 50 emails/day

100 test emails/day

50 emails/day

What are the limits really and what is the difference between a test email and a non-test email?

We're pretty heavy senders on Mailgun. I'm not a huge fan of them, in particular now that Sinch seems to be slowly trying to force their hands into everything. Biggest features we like are their analytics and tagging support so we can see open and click rate on the different types of emails we send. Purchase dedicated send IPs is important so our reputation isn't getting tanked by some spammer sharing an IP, and their "Optimize" product which pulls in Google Postmaster, Microsoft SNDS reporting, trap monitoring is really great.

Hi HN,

I'm Clément, a freelance developer for 5 years now. I've worked in several startups and often encountered the same problem: creating stunning transactional emails was a real headache to create and maintain.

So, I created Mailhub, an email API with all the tools to make it easier to build, test, send, track & monitor transactional emails

Among other features, you can:

- Use reusable layouts & pages powered by Tailwind - Dark-mode & responsive supported - Access a virtual outbox - i18n - Build from pre-built templates ...

All of this comes with a simple API & reliable deliverability rates.

I hope you like it as much as I do. I'm really open to feedback!

See you soon

Nice pricing, slightly better priced than other email APIs.

I can also use it with my own templates, where I pass your API the full email body as HTML? I've already done the work for managing my own email templates and would only need a swap-in replacement for the email deliverability part if Mailgun becomes too expensive or their service declines after their acquisition.

Are you using SES for actual sending?

Thinking homophonically, Malehub seems like a great name for a Grindr clone.

I need one for sms. twilio is garbage now.

What's with the Tailwind CSS stuff on the home page? It seems a bit out of place to me.

This looks like a great solution to the problems that designers have with emails, but I'm not seeing much for other stakeholders – marketing, merchandising, engineering, compliance/legal.

It looks like the only tracking is open rate? Now I don't enjoy being tracked myself, but sadly it's a fact of life in email marketing, and table stakes for email products – is there any click through rate tracking? How do you handle custom click through domains? How do you handle anti-tracking technology in Safari? How do you handle open rate tracking with Gmail and other clients pre-loading images?

A common request from marketing (name may vary) at my previous company was for all emails to be sent at a specified time. Do you handle this? If not what's your send-rate per customer, how long should customers budget for a campaign to go out? What's the quota per customer on the send API, how many requests per second can they make?

A common request from engineering at my previous company was for emails to be spread over a time range so that the site didn't receive a million hits at once, even just hits loading dynamic images from the emails, let alone actual click-throughs. Do you have any controls for spreading delivery over time?

How do you ensure your users are GDPR compliant? The example email on the homepage doesn't show an unsubscribe link, but these are legally required in many countries. How does the tooling support this? Do you offer end-users one-click unsubscriptions? Are users prompted when they attempt to save a template without an unsubscribe link to prevent human error?

Having developed a few HTML emails in my time, this does look like a joy to use for that purpose, but having seen a company try out different transactional and marketing email service providers, overhaul their email approach for deliverability, cope with the Safari tracking changes, keep a site online during sale periods, meet regulatory compliance both for the company and for our clients, and accidentally DDoS itself with emails multiple times in different ways, I'm not sure Mailhub solves or aids any of these problems.

In the end we mostly either outsourced the HTML email authoring for little money or used frameworks like MJML, and the HTML email "tears" went away.

If you have solutions to these problems, great! I'd highly encourage you to add them to your marketing page or docs (I couldn't see them) because these are things potential customers may be looking for. If you don't have solutions I'd encourage considering them.

Could you remove the powered by Tailwind?

Is it just me or the fancy animations makes the page laggy when scrolling?

I am on firefox on Linux.