Alternatives to SendinBlue

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

When starting a new company and building a new product w/ limited engineering we chose to optimize for expertise and rapid development, landing on Rails API, w/ AngularJS on the front.

The reality is that we're building a CRUD app, so we considered going w/ vanilla Rails MVC to optimize velocity early on (it may not be sexy, but it gets the job done). Instead, we opted to split the codebase to allow for a richer front-end experience, focus on skill specificity when hiring, and give us the flexibility to be consumed by multiple clients in the future.

We also considered .NET core or Node.js for the API layer, and React on the front-end, but our experiences dealing with mature Node APIs and the rapid-fire changes that comes with state management in React-land put us off, given our level of experience with those tools.

We're using GitHub and Trello to track issues and projects, and a plethora of other tools to help the operational team, like Zapier, MailChimp, Google Drive with some basic Vue.js & HTML5 apps for smaller internal-facing web projects.

At StackShare we were discussing how to increase the retention of our newly signed up users. We hypothesized that if we made certain changes to the emails in our on-boarding process we could increase our retention and activation of users.

We decided to use sendwithus because it offered us the ability to A/B test our transactional emails. We also utilized the sendwithus analytics dashboard to gain real time insight into the performance of our email campaigns. Furthermore sendwithus has a Rails gem that allowed us to easily integrate the product into our application. We were also able to integrate sendwithus with our SendGrid account. #ABTestingAnalytics #TransactionalEmail

Nexmo vs Twilio ?

Back in the early days at SmartZip Analytics, that evaluation had - for whatever reason - been made by Product Management. Some developers might have been consulted, but we hadn't made the final call and some key engineering aspects of it were omitted.

When revamping the platform, I made sure to flip the decision process how it should be. Business provided an input but Engineering lead the way and has the final say on all implementation matters. My engineers and I decided on re-evaluating the criteria and vendor selection. Not only did we need SMS support, but were we not thinking about #VoiceAndSms support as the use cases evolved.

Also, on an engineering standpoint, SDK mattered. Nexmo didn't have any. Twilio did. No-one would ever want to re-build from scratch integration layers vendors should naturally come up with and provide their customers with.

Twilio won on all fronts. Including costs and implementation timelines. No-one even noticed the vendor switch.

Many years later, Twilio demonstrated its position as a leader by holding conferences in the Bay Area, announcing features like Twilio Functions. Even acquired Authy which we also used for 2FA. Twilio's growth has been amazing. Its recent acquisition of SendGrid continues to show it.

We are considering whether to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud or integrate ActiveCampaign into the Salesforce Sales and Service module.

We've moved our transactional email away from Mandrill to Mailgun. We had continued using Mandrill after Mailchimp deprecated the service awhile back, because the amount of credits we were offered essentially made it free.

However, following a couple weeks of frequent downtime and poor service transparency from Mandrill, we decided it was time to make the switch. It appears they no longer had any engineers with the ability to identify the core problems.

Mailgun has been more reliable, yet not as reliable as we expected. We still see issues a few times per week with the API failing when we attempt to make a call. The Reporting UI is way better.