You know Joeyk, their service quality is what I would call Cheap and Nasty but their pricing does not match this overall. I agree SES is dirt cheap. But have you looked at AWS and S3 pricing? If you move into the ecosystem you’re essentially paying a lot more than you should overall.
The admin panel is a dog. Even though it promises metrics I don’t really find any of their metrics useful. It’s just a case of bad UX to keep the user/admin busy. And their policies are draconian like being part of a dictatorship.
I save a heap on not using S3 so I can afford to pay a bit more for email if I want. But to be honest we’re paying people to manage email ip reputation. This is essentially a labor function not metal.
If you want to send 1mil email messages maybe you’ll bear with their issues by hiring someone to do that full time. I’m not trying that kind of scale I just want to send email reliably. And as a small business user I don’t have time to fiddle with their UI for weeks and redo it on their whim.
To be honest their brand promise is that they will handle administration so you don’t have to. However at my scale SES creates more issues than it solves. This means SES essentially breaks it’s brand promise.
Honestly when they pause email I have to restart campaigns in Mautic and figure out who got skipped. They rate limit email to 17messages per second in my account and just seem to drop everything above that in a batch.
Is it really worth the hassle to have half your email go through and the rest get stuck somewhere in Cyberspace. Their interface does not make it clear if the mail was sent is queued or got dropped. I see 2x the amount of sends in Mautic than in their panel.
There’s a point where Cheap is more expensive because you’re expending undue effort to accommodate shoddy execution.
For the scale of email I’m sending I could monitor my email reputation well and just warm up an IP. I don’t need 20 000 capacity overnight. As a sysadmin I’ll end up with less frustration just managing it. Or I could pay more for someone else to do. Either way it’s less painful than than wondering if email gets delivered or not. And checking daily if they decided to have a brain fart and turn off the account because of a technicality without warning. This essentially makes their service unpredictable and wreaks havoc with campaigns in Mautic. And regardless of their “ip reputation” it has little value to me if they don’t allow me to make use of it.
As I said in the beginning I’m not running weird campaigns that are supposed to fall outside their terms. I send Marketing and Transaction emails to customers that I speak to in person often. None of these people are unaware of my existence. They’ve opted in. And I don’t even want to send 1000’s of emails. I’m happy with a batch of 100-200.
To some it may be worth it to bear with such company policies. To me the pain is not worth it even if they give the service away for free on these terms I don’t want it.
This is of course my opinion and I know there are others who will feel very differently. I’ve just discovered that I am not an AWS customer. I feel so strongly about this I closed my account point blank after using their services for several years.
It may sound as if I’ve got a short temper. And in fact the opposite is true. I’m extremely patient and it takes me a long time to reach a point like this. I actually give suppliers and people the benefit of the doubt many times over. But if things just can’t work I vote with my feet and never look back.