We were building umbrellatoday.app and needed to send about 1,000 transactional emails a day. Weather alerts, password resets, the usual. Not a huge volume, but not a hobby project either. Just a real product with real users that needed reliable email delivery.
When we started looking at providers, the pricing didn't make sense. Monthly minimums assumed 10x our volume. Per-seat fees for a team of one. Enterprise tiers locked behind sales calls. The free tiers worked fine for a side project, but the moment we needed something in between, moderate volume with a verified domain and basic event tracking, we were stuck overpaying for capacity we didn't need.
The buy-in problem
Sending transactional email isn't complicated. You verify a domain, authenticate with SPF and DKIM, send through a relay, and handle bounces. Providers have been doing this for decades. The infrastructure is well understood.
The problem is the buy-in. Every platform we tried was built for one of two customers: hobbyists sending a handful of emails for free, or enterprises sending millions and happy to pay hundreds per month. If you were somewhere in the middle, a real product with moderate volume and a tight budget, you were stuck.
One API call, a verified domain, and infrastructure that handles bounces and complaints automatically. That's all we actually needed. Why should that cost $50-200/month before you send anything?
So we built IvyMail.
Simple, reliable, fairly priced
IvyMail isn't trying to be the cheapest email provider. It's trying to be the most fair. Plans that are granular enough to match your actual usage, so pricing grows with you instead of forcing a large upfront commitment. No per-seat charges. No enterprise gates on basic features. Everything, the dashboard, analytics, webhooks, team access, is included from the start.
Simple. One API call to send an email. Guided DNS setup that walks you through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC with real-time verification. A clean dashboard that shows you exactly what's happening.
Reliable. Every email passes through a 7-step pre-send safety check: reputation status, domain ownership, domain health, rate limits, domain warmup, payment status, and suppression list. Bounces and complaints are handled automatically. Suppressed addresses are blocked platform-wide. Your sender reputation is monitored in real time, with alerts and automatic throttling before you hit dangerous thresholds.
Fairly priced. Start free, then move to a plan that fits your volume. Tiers are small and granular, so you're never paying for 10x what you need just to get access. Designed for developers who want pricing that scales with them, not ahead of them.
What we built in
Here's what IvyMail ships with:
- Email API. Send transactional emails with a single API call. REST API with support for templates, attachments, and custom headers.
- Custom domain verification. Verify your sending domains with guided DNS setup. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC configuration with real-time propagation checks. Automatic setup for Cloudflare domains.
- Bounce and complaint handling. Automatic suppression list management. Bounced and complained addresses are tracked and blocked platform-wide from future sends without any manual intervention.
- Reputation monitoring. Track your sender reputation in real time. Automatic throttling at 5% bounce rate or 0.08% complaint rate, with sending paused entirely if rates exceed safe thresholds. Alerts fire before you're in trouble.
- Domain warmup. New domains are automatically rate-limited through volume-based stages (50, 100, 200 emails/day), so you build reputation gradually without thinking about it.
- Account safety. Comprehensive abuse prevention with account suspension, workspace soft-delete with a 30-day recovery window, and content validation on every send.
- Per-domain region selection. Choose from 12 AWS regions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Optimize for latency or meet data residency requirements on a per-domain basis.
- Outbound webhooks. Real-time notifications for deliveries, bounces, and complaints. Inspect payloads, configure retry logic, and integrate delivery events into your own systems.
- Send logs and analytics. Full visibility into every email. Search, filter, and inspect delivery status and event history from the dashboard.
- Rate limiting. Built-in hourly, daily, and monthly rate limits protect your sender reputation without you having to think about it.
- Team management. Invite team members to your workspace with role-based access control and audit logs for every action.
Why "Ivy"?
Ivy grows steadily, adapts to its environment, and holds strong once rooted. That's the kind of infrastructure we want to build: reliable, resilient, and always growing with you.
Get started
IvyMail is live today. Create a workspace, verify your domain, and send your first email in under five minutes.
We built this because we needed it. If you've hit the same wall, give it a try.