useSend

What useSend is

useSend is an open-source email platform for sending product, transactional and marketing email from one account. The homepage headline is "The open source email platform for everyone," and the next line carries the pricing idea: "Pay only for what you send and not for storing contacts." A strip under the headline sums the offer up in three points: open source, self-host in minutes, and a free tier.

The About section is plain about the plumbing: "As most of email products out there, useSend also uses Amazon SES under the hood to send emails." What useSend adds, in its own words, is "an open and alternative way to send emails reliably and cheaply with a great dashboard." The company says it is bootstrapped and funded by its cloud offering and by sponsors, and it asks anyone who self-hosts useSend to consider sponsoring the project. The code is on GitHub, so a team can use the hosted cloud offering or run the platform on its own servers.

The homepage quotes users from open-source and indie products. Marc Seitz of papermark.com says his team moved "our 30k and growing newsletter" to useSend. Tommerty of doras.to says it "was extremely easy to set up" and credits Koushik with personal help on issues and feedback. Further quotes come from people behind coolify.io, jsx.email and onetimefax.com. The mix says a lot about the audience: developers who run a product and want its mail, and often its newsletter, to go through a tool they can inspect.

Sending through the API or SMTP

For developers the pitch is "Typed SDKs and simple APIs, so you can focus on product not plumbing." The homepage shows the same send in TypeScript, Python, Go and PHP. The TypeScript example imports the usesend-js package and calls usesend.emails.send, the Python example imports usesend and returns either data or an error, and the Go and PHP examples post JSON straight to the REST endpoint at app.usesend.com/api/v1/emails with the API key in a Bearer authorization header. A send takes the usual fields: recipient, sender, subject, an HTML body and a plain-text body.

The second route is SMTP. useSend offers a "Drop-in SMTP relay that works with any app or framework," so software that already sends mail over SMTP can be pointed at useSend without code changes. The page ties the relay to avoiding vendor lock-in and names one place where it comes in handy: services like Supabase.

Campaigns and the editor

Marketing mail is built in a visual editor that the homepage describes as a "notion like WYSIWYG editor" for designing campaigns without code, one that "works in major email clients." Templates and brand styles can be reused from one campaign to the next, and variables personalize each message. Campaign results sit in the same analytics as transactional mail, and the page says senders can track which campaigns perform best.

Contacts and suppression

Contacts, lists and consent are managed in one place. Contacts can be imported and exported, and each contact keeps a per-list subscription status, so a person can stay on one list after leaving another. Bounces and complaints update contact records automatically.

A separate suppression list is there to prevent accidental sends. It fills itself from bounces and complaints, can be managed by import and export or through the API, and applies to transactional and marketing email alike. For a product that sends receipts and newsletters from the same account, that means an address that bounced on one kind of mail is also held back from the other.

Analytics and logs

Tracking covers deliveries, opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes in real time, in what the page calls "a simple, searchable log." The log can be filtered by domain, by status and by API key, and the results can be exported. Filtering by API key lets a team separate the traffic of different applications or environments that share one account.

Plans and prices

The pricing section is headed "pay for what you use, the most affordable email platform," and it lists two plans.

• Free, $0 per month. Up to 3000 emails a month and up to 100 emails a day, with 1 contact book, 1 domain and 1 team member.
• Paid, $10 minimum usage per month. The plan includes $10 in monthly usage credits. Transactional emails cost $0.0004 each and marketing emails $0.001 each, and contact books, domains and team members are unlimited.

A pricing calculator lets visitors drag sliders to estimate a monthly bill. Its default example is 5,000 marketing emails at $0.0010 each, which comes to $5.00, plus 12,500 transactional emails at $0.0004 each, another $5.00, for an estimated total of $10.00 before taxes. That is the paid plan's monthly minimum, so a sender at that mix pays nothing beyond it. Two points stand out in this model. Stored contacts cost nothing on either plan, and marketing mail is priced higher per message than transactional mail, so the split between the two matters when estimating a bill.

Support and contact

The footer lists email, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Discord and Bluesky as ways to reach the team, next to links for the dashboard, the documentation and the GitHub repository. The doras.to quote describes Koushik as "an absolute awesome person to deal with" who helps with issues and feedback. The site also publishes privacy and terms pages.

Who it suits

useSend fits developers, indie builders and open-source teams who want product, transactional and marketing email in one tool, priced per message with free contact storage. The free plan is enough to wire up a side project, with the 100-a-day cap as the limit to watch. The paid plan's $10 minimum covers a mixed volume like the calculator's example, and unlimited domains and team members make it workable for a small company running several products. Teams that are happy with Amazon SES as the delivery layer but want a dashboard, contact lists, suppression, a campaign editor and searchable logs on top get that without building it, and teams that want to own the whole stack can self-host from GitHub. Supabase users have a named use case for the SMTP relay. Senders with large volumes should run their own numbers through the calculator, since every email past the credits is billed at the per-message rate.