Which email sending service are you using?
Surveying for our internal research. Please select which email sending service you are using.
We recommend email sending services like SES / SendGrid / Mailgun / Brevo / Postmark etc.
Most of our customers get frustrated with pricing. All the companies (except SES) charge by package. Even if you send a few 1000s emails, they charge like $25 to $50, which is really super expensive in terms of value.
Please choose one or multiple from this list and in the comment, please specify if you are loving any feature with your current provider or any extra feature you wish they had.
We use zeptomail by Zoho. 10,000 emails for free. Then 2.5USD for 10,000 emails. Cheaper alternative after SES.
arjun arjun Interesting. How good is it in terms of deliverability?
Nazir Himel Highly satisfied with their service till date.
arjun arjun will zepto mail will work with Fluent SMTP with out any issues ?
D S Yes without any issues. Zeptomail is the best that I have ever used.
arjun arjun we switched from SES to Zeptomail. Never looked back. The option to create agents to separate sending between domains (or even purposes) is outstanding.
Me too
arjun arjun I didn’t know at all. I used to use AWS until now but it’s so much hassle!
After reading your message, I created a Zeptomail account and it was very easy to set up and install.
So, a big thank you!: -)
Christelle Petry Thank you for considering me thank worthy!: -)
arjun arjun I also use zeptomail. It's simple, reliable and affordable.
I use Sendgrid: 1 account for multiple websites. I have very few transactional emails, some fluentCRM automations and low-number newsletter (very specific). Sendgrid was free for I did, but they lowered the bar and upped the price.
I also used SES, which worked flawless, until it didn’t. Too complex to solve the riddles, too technical for me, no responsive support at the time. Thus I went back to SendGrid.
Karsten Risseeuw Yes, that's the problem with AWS. Absolutely 0 support and if you get lots of spam in a day or bounce rate increased, you will get banned!
Shahjahan Jewel AWS charged me $35 for 18k emails. In the second month, even though I didn’t use any emails, they charged me $115, and in the following month $105! I was forced to move away from AWS.
Arif Kazi Maybe you did something wrong configurations. Did you purchase multiple dedicated IP?
Shahjahan Jewel Maybe! Their configuration is a bit complicated. Perhaps there was a misconfiguration somewhere.
Arif Kazi yes, it's a Ship with 1000s of buttons :P
Shahjahan Jewel haha, that’s true 😁
They never accepted me, a categorical refusal... After a lot of time spent configuring, accepting, sending various things, for nothing 🙄
Arif Kazi , any chance you accidently leaked your access credentials (git repository, for example?)
That happened with one of my clients a ways back with Mandrill, not SES, but was a bit of a pain to track down why their their bills were so high.
I wish FluentSMTP would consider Zoho.
I use MailGun and SendGrid and I hate it because who expensive it is.
Here is my suggestion/request: Please build one and make it affordable like Amazon SES - all the complications. I would love to switch.
What do you guys think about Brevo.com?
David Scurlock been using it for many years, have a paid account and fixed IP. 90% of all my client emails go out through it, but have a couple of their free accounts for a few sites who can get a bit spammy from time to time (don't want to ruin the reputation of the fixed IP).
I setup the AWS ses based on the instructions from the WP Ninja. I would not have figured it out on my own. But I did get it done 🥵
Elastic Email through Cloudways add-on. It’s cheap and it works.
Kaneisha G. yes, elastic email provided by cloudways is very very cheap and cost effective. On the other hand email provided by xCloud (Where Shahjahan Jewel is one of the Board Members) is the most expensive one)
Kaneisha G. Poor sending authority though, unfortunately. Basically nothing makes it into MS Network inboxes from Elastic
Kyle Darling interesting!
Kaneisha G. This is what the other half of my clients use (the ones who like me to do everything for them).
Kyle Darling really (about the MS network inboxes)? None of my clients have said anything about it. I also use their recommendations for the spf, dkim, and dmarc.
I did have issues with some client email delivery but once I had their DNS go through Cloudflare, we haven't had any issues.
We use Maileroo and love it! 🧡It allows transactional and marketing emails (just no cold emailing!). We use it with FluentSMTP (via smtp) and it’s always flawless. Though I do really wish for a Fluent integration with Maileroo’s API. 🙏🏼
Pricing: we have it on a generous LTD that’s long gone off offer. But I almost didn’t spring for the ltd because of their free tier and reasonable pricing. They’ve not ever been squirrelly about the ltd, and if I exceed our plan I’ll stay & pay. It’s that good.
Reading through the comments here about others’ experiences, I have to note that Maileroo is dead simple to setup. And there’s zero maintenance.
Charlotte D thanks for the Maileroo mention as they look very affordable. Hadn't heard of them and use Brevo as my quick client platform to get email sending in place. I'm going to consider Maileroo now as a replacement.
Have you had any issues with deliverability?
Chris Davis Glad this might be helpful for you! I have not had any deliverability issues. Based upon my few brief conversations with them, I get the impression that they take server reputation very seriously. And I always go through the full email setup process on my end with dns records - never a problem.
Shahjahan Jewel If you’re considering new integrations: I recently had a chat with a Maileroo founder about them bringing their API/dedicated integration to FluentSMTP. He was absolutely interested. I got the impression, though, that they weren’t super familiar with the WP process or how to go about this.
PostMark has been great. Works perfectly with FluentSMTP
What delivery issues have Amazon SES users been having? "I've been an amazon SES user for years and never had an issues at all? Rock solid and very inexpensive sending from our domains with dkim/spf etc.
James Maduk we also use Amazon SES. It’s just bit tricky to get started.
I use AWS SES, but a client couldn't get approved because they were concerned his work in a medical field would generate spam. We ended up using PostMark, which seems to be a pretty good service so far.
I use Brevo (quite reliable, but pricing has changed, so I might switch) or my host (Hostinger) for small transactional needs. I’m also keeping an eye on the solution announced by Cloudflare (blog.cloudflare.com/email-service), no pricing known yet, to be followed.
Apparently I'm using Elastic Mail. That's what xCloud set up for me.
We switched from Amazon SES to Elastic Email and then to Postal. We’ve stuck with Postal for a couple of years now. The bounce handler works great with FluentCRM. I’d love to see a full API integration with FluentSMTP in the future.
We left Amazon SES years ago for GDPR compliance reasons, shortly after the Privacy Shield agreement got nulled. Amazon SES is probably GDPR compliant again, at least for the moment.
We never had any deliverability issues with any of the mentioned services, though we’ve always used a private IP address. We could’ve stuck with Elastic Email but we lowered our costs by switching to Postal.
I added some additional info, @jewel.
Currently trialling smtp2go.
John Waters : glad with SMTP2GO. Everythings works as expected! Delivery is good.
Milan De Keijzer Wish I had have setup the webhooks first !
Postmark fan here. They had a blip where they were changing their packages and it looked like it would suddenly become very expensive, but that's been resolved now.
Jonathan Gwyer There was no pricing change? I stopped following them after the original announcement.
Charlotte D their "Platform" package was made a lot more reasonable.
Problem is mainly crazy ammount of emails sended by FC. Make push notifications instead and it will be much better. Email notifications were "in" in 2010 maybe.
Drive Zone true that
Related: Not sure why big companies act like this
Shahjahan Jewel Unbelievable. I sure hope they reconsider their decision and send a small donation your ways.
Karl Emil Nikka To be honest, I don't need any donations. Just wanted to keep the integration up to date. Sometimes they change their API!
Shahjahan Jewel I know you don’t need the money. I just hope they understand they should fund the development of the integration with today’s go-to SMTP plugin for all WordPress sites.
Shahjahan Jewel Thats embarrassing, they should consider themselves lucky... 🤦♂️
Shahjahan Jewel remove them and move onto a business that actually would appreciate any collaboration and free advertising they can get.
Shahjahan Jewel Not very Elastic it would seem
Shahjahan Jewel not very collaborative!
I used Amazon SES for mass mailing (MTA/SMTP) across our own and clients’ sites, then migrated to Brevo, and finally to Emailit. Well, we never looked back :)
Emailit is my top choice because of how they manage network reputation. They make sure new accounts, which could potentially be used for spam, don’t affect the deliverability of established senders.
Their API is well-documented and feature-rich, so we could integrate with FluentSMTP easily and get detailed reports on bounces, soft and hard failures, suppressions, and more—helping us keep our sending reputation clean. For now, I’ve connected our Emailit accounts via SMTP and use a custom monitoring and reporting app to analyze and manage the types of issues mentioned above.
Pricing is competitive and flexible, with on-demand plans starting at just €0.10 per 1,000 messages. I’d love to see FluentSMTP add a native Emailit integration so we can connect via API instead of SMTP.
Sascha Liem I will keep this in mind if I should need such a service. It does sound promising.
David Scurlock If you’d like to test them, keep in mind that new accounts are first placed on a more generic mail server network, which already performs very well. After a 2–3 month warm-up period, I recommend contacting their support team and asking to have your account moved to their well-established network.
Sascha Liem I may just do that. Im not tech savvy but I have a developer that handles all this stuff. Im in no hurry either so I can just ride the wave until I prove myself worthy or that I am not a spammer. Thanks
David Scurlock Wish you good luck & effort ✌️
Sascha Liem thanks for sharing this alternative. It looks like one of the best options so far. I hope Shahjahan Jewel and team can look into it and hopefully create a native integration with FluentSMTP.
Sascha Liem Emailit has currently a Lifetime Deal in AppSummo. Unfortunately, there are many bad reviews there, so I'm hesitant to get it... Have you had any delivery issues with it?
JF new accounts are placed in a sandbox, sorta like Google, and you may experience sending issues and this is where the complaints come from. They do this because of spammers. Just contact them and ask to verify your account and they will remove you from the sandbox and you are good to go.
We use Zoho Zeptomail which is perfect for transactional emails. It is not for marketing emails. We still use SES for marketing mails via FluentCommunity, but I’d prefer an alternative with better logging (like Zeptomail or Postmark). But alternatives have these ridiculously high price tags and usually sell only monthly packages that do not fit the business. Hence, for larger marketing campaigns, we use Zoho Campaigns.
I use Google workspace account. On multiple sites, so far so good.
Been reading through and no one talks about Emailit. At the moment there is an LTD on Appsumo and works pretty well....
Sophia S how can it be LTD when emailit is a credit based platform since credits never expire?
Sophia S I see One Star reviews on AppSumo than Five Star reviews.
David Scurlock in the LTD they offer several tiers with a certain amount of credits that reset monthly. It's definitely a great deal, but unfortunately, there are many bad reviews there and I'm hesitant to get it...
JF you should contact them directly about your concerns.
David Scurlock Do you use Emailit? How has your experience been with them?
David Scurlock The LTD is for a set number of emails each month that resets, which is how Mailchimp or any other major service works as well.
I use Emailit whenever I can. AWS when I can't.
Lee Busch what do you mean? Why you cant always with emailit?
Andre Gois Some webhosts block the ports that are needed for Emailit SMTP connections.
Shahjahan Jewel we own a hosting company so we use our SMTP, Fluent SMTP, FluentCRM to send emails. Once we warm up our email boxes we can send thousands in a day or batch the emails.....
I use MailerSend ( the same company from MailerLite ) and this is great service.
Michal Paczula +1 for half of my clients. I have Amazon SES for my businesses but I've had them set up for a really long time.
MailerSend is easy enough for my clients to figure out (although I normally walk them through the process), affordable for beginners and haven't had any issues (other than having to do manual resolution of bounces... would be great if that was included).
A lot of customers on Elastic Email.
I’ve been using SMPT2GO for a long time now. Their support is amazing, the pricing is very fair and I’ve had zero issues since day one. I can honestly recommend them to anyone.
We create the design first with Postcard-Designmodo or with Tabular, and we import the html in Brevo. Brevo has an excellent support.
I hope Fluent CRM + Etch will allow customizing the design directly in WP admin.
I used to use SES for myself and clients, what it is an absolute pain in the a** in every possible way. For my own site, I am still set up with them, so I just leave it. But, I use Postmark now, for all clients, and anything new. You get what you pay for.
David Risley I think so. I just set up Postmark for a client after SES denied him (health care field). It works fine, does a good job of segregating transactional and broadcast messages. I'm also on AWS and it was a pain to get started.
Why is it so deliberately obtuse?
Brevo works well, easy to setup, good price
Amazon SES has been great. Fingers crossed.
FluentMail? 😉
Server based from my c-panel. I guarantee their emails and addresses won’t be read by third party senders. If they choose to use a snoopservice like Gmail to receive it, that’s on them.
SES for marketing, ZeptoMail for transactional.
Tried almost all of them. These two have the best balance of price and inbox delivery.
We use Postmark. Love being able to set up separate sending servers for each client so one client's sending won't impact anyone else. It's easy to set up and get configured with the Postmark API.
I don't like how FluentCRM handles bounces with Postmark. Soft bounces are treated like hard bounces and changes the contact status to bounced. We have to train people to review the bounces periodically and switch soft bounces back to subscribed to try re-sending to them. Postmark has a suppression list. I wish FluentCRM would update contact status based on the Postmark suppression list or have a soft bounce counter like the SES integration so the first soft bounce doesn't mark the contact bounced.
Postmark also has a batch sending endpoint. It would be awesome if FluentCRM could use that and send up to 500 messages in one API call. It would speed up sending to larger lists.