Why is it so expensive to send an email? | Hacker News Reader

Why is it so expensive to send an email?

evancz.dev

34 pointswheatBread12 comments

It's because of IP reputation and spam blocking. You can't start with a "clean" address and send mail. You need to spend some time on "address warming" to build reputation for the address before the big providers will accept mail from it.

I'll suggest a possible answer: vetting customers is expensive, and if you don't vet, Spamhaus vets you.

CEO of EmailOctopus here (sending multiple billions of emails a year) so I have a bit of experience in this area.

As others have mentioned, a lot of the cost comes down to managing IP reputation and deliverability. But there's also the infrastructure needed to send emails at scale, process billions of events (bounces, opens, clicks) and pass those events back to the caller, which all needs to happen within seconds at scale. Most users also expect click tracking, which means more infrastructure, more domains to protect against blocklists, and even more due diligence on who's sending through your platform.

That's not to say most providers aren't charging too much, IMO, but it's not quite as simple as it might first seem.

That said I haven't come across anyone charging $15 for 1,000 transactional emails, as the OP suggests. Probably a typo. For comparison, SES is $0.10 per 1,000.

A long time ago I used RabbitMQ at the heart of a service built on top of an existing relatively modest fleet of SMTP servers.

I wonder if you guys are using or have considered using Apache Iggy over there https://iggy.apache.org/

Email is expensive because the tacit permission of the receiver is not handled end to end.

Yes, there is actually a way to solve the end to end tacit permission problem, which involves cryptography (obviously). And yes, there is a way to make it ergonomic in a way that users could actually use and understand it well enough that the below-average user would do fine with it.

With this problem solved, all of the anti-spam stuff and all the trouble that comes with it becomes obsolete. Until this has happened, email is going to continue suck a lot.

Related question: Why is it so expensive to send (or charge) money? At least in the US

How expensive is it?

Because of extra services. Unlike emails, which usually come with no guarantees or support, the money-sending services are protected. Even with something like EFT, consumers have 60 days in case of actual fraud or bank mistakes, and with credit cards, you are also protected from things like product non-delivery.

Those protections exist and cost money - both to pay for customer support handing those, as well as to reimburse customer when the original money cannot be found anymore.

(And related, this is one of the big problems with cryptocurrencies: most people are not happy to know that one typo / software bug means their money is lost forever. Those protections on regular baking are there for a reason.)

It was very disorienting to be reading about “Elm development” in the context of e-mail, but having it refer to the language and not the e-mail client from the 1980s.

If it's too expensive to send email, why is my inbox constantly flooded with spam? Surely it should be more expensive!

There are certainly cheaper options than $15 per 1000 emails - I think Amazon's SES is more like $0.10 - $0.20 per 1000.

Founder of EmailFig here. I agree the raw sending is the cheap part.

Most of the work goes into reputation management and customer support and in my experience, most of the cost is marketing.

For raw sending there are plenty of cheaper options, as others have mentioned. SES, for example, charges ~$0.10 per 1,000.

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