Why we built it
We were paying for rows, not for mail.
Common Ninja makes five products. In August 2026 they sent their email through five separate accounts on two providers, and the bill had almost nothing to do with how much mail went out.
The bill was for list size
Mailchimp priced Common Ninja’s newsletter by contacts: 200,000 people on the list, about $1,800 a month, whether or not a campaign went out. Resend priced the four smaller products by tier, and its marketing plans by contacts too. Sending 200,000 emails costs $20 at the layer every provider runs on.
That gap widens every month, because a growing list is the point of the product and every provider we used charged for it. It is why the one rule of SendRaven’s pricing is that a contact is free. One meter: emails sent.
What the money did not buy
Cost was the reason to look. It was not the reason to build. Three of the five products are run in part by agents, and the email API they had could not do the things an agent needs.
- It could not read the reply. Inbound arrived as a webhook with the whole quoted history attached and no idea which message it answered. Joining it to a conversation, stripping the quote, and asking “what is waiting on me” were all ours to build, in every product, again.
- It could not constrain a key. A credential handed to an agent could send to anyone, as often as it liked, with no way to hold a draft for a person. The only limit was the workspace quota, which trips after the mail has gone.
- Unsubscribe did not stop the sequence. Opting out of a welcome series suppressed the address but left days three, six and ten scheduled. Finding and cancelling them meant paging through the provider’s message list by hand.
- Marketing and transactional were two products. Two dashboards, two suppression lists that disagreed, and a pricing gap that rewarded labelling a campaign as transactional, which is exactly what breaks the reputation split.
So we built it on the thing underneath
Every provider we used runs on the same substrate or its equivalent. It bills about $0.10 per thousand and gives you nothing else: no suppression list, no scheduler, no bounce handling, no threading, and a sandbox you have to write to a human to leave. That missing layer is about six weeks of work, and it is the whole product.
SendRaven is that layer, with the rules we wanted written into the send path rather than a settings page. Two sending identities per domain so a campaign cannot reach a password reset. Suppression scoped by kind, so a marketing opt-out never blocks a receipt. Unsubscribe as two writes. Threads joined on Message-ID and never on subject. Limits on the key. A campaign refused before it starts if the bounce or complaint rate says it should be.
The five products moved first. SendRaven sends its own mail through itself, on the same identity split and the same plan rules as every other tenant, because a rule we would not accept for our own products is not a rule.
Why sell it
Because the problem is not ours. Anyone building a product that talks to people over email and lets software do the talking hits the same four walls, and the answer they are offered is a bigger tier of the same API. We would rather offer the layer.
What we are not, yet
Honest about the trade. We do not have a decade of warm IPs or an abuse team of forty, and we will not quote a deliverability figure until we have earned one. What we have is a send path that refuses to do the things that get accounts paused, five products depending on it, and a bill we can show you.