Friendliest App

We chose Postmark as our transactional email service for several reasons:

• Laser-focus (at the time) on transactional email - their success/speed/reliability with delivering transactional email is amazing. Note, they have now branched out and offer marketing/broadcast email services too.

• Developer-friendly - Awesome docs and resources. Their Rail gem integrates directly with ActionMailer so nearly all of our code worked without changes.

• Servers - You can set up "Servers" for different mail streams/workflows to keep things separate and easy to review.

• Bootstrapped - Wildbit (who makes Postmark) is bootstrapped just like the Friendliest.app and they offer a service credit to other bootstrapped startups.

The Friendliest.app started on Heroku (both app and db) like most of my projects. The db on Heroku was on the cusp of becoming prohibitively expensive for this project.

After looking at options and reading recommendations we settled on Render to host both the application and db. Render's pricing model seems to scale more linearly with the application instead of the large pricing/performance jumps experienced with Heroku.

Migration to Render was extremely easy and we were able to complete both the db and application moves within 24 hours.

The only thing we're really missing on Render is a CLI. With Heroku, we could manage everything from the command line in VSCode. With Render, you need to use the web shell they provide.

We needed a monitoring tool to track application uptime, response time and provide a public status page.

After looking at several options including the big ones like Pingdom and Pingometer, we went with updown.io. Their pricing model allowed us to pay for exactly what we needed (number of endpoints and frequency) without selling us anything we weren't going to use.

Their interface is easy to use, service has been rock solid and their public status pages look great.