Volanea

What Volanea is

Volanea is an email platform that puts three kinds of sending in one product: transactional email sent through an API, campaigns broadcast to a list, and lifecycle automation. Its homepage calls it "The complete email platform" and sums it up as "Transactional email, campaigns, and lifecycle automation on one contact graph," with sender reputation watched along the way. The audience is product and SaaS teams that send both the mail their application triggers and the newsletters and onboarding sequences around it.

The central idea is the contact graph. According to the homepage, most teams "duct-tape three vendors together and copy contacts between them." In Volanea, API sends, campaigns and journeys all write to the same record, "so segments, suppressions, and analytics always agree." The page gives three consequences: a welcome campaign that already knows what the API sent, unsubscribes and bounces honored everywhere instantly, and one timeline per person showing every email, open, click and event. The contact graph has "No contact limits," according to the feature list.

Sending through the API

A send is one request to the /v1/send endpoint with a Bearer secret key. The homepage example posts a recipient, a subject and a template name, and adds an idempotency key tied to an order number so a retried request does not send twice. Templates, variables and attachments are all part of the same call. Test-mode keys, in the site's words, "render everything and deliver nothing," which lets a team run its whole flow in development without mailing anyone, and every rendered message is still logged.

Beyond sending, the API accepts product events at /v1/events, and those events feed a cursor-paginated activity feed alongside the email events. The event names shown on the homepage give a sense of what can be tracked and hooked into: email.sent, email.delivered, email.opened, email.clicked, email.bounced, contact.created, contact.unsubscribed, campaign.sent, segment.entered, segment.exited, workflow.completed and webhook.delivered.

An SMTP relay is listed as well, described as "A real SMTP endpoint for anything that can't speak HTTP," but the feature list marks it as coming soon, so for now the HTTP API is the way in.

Campaigns, segments and workflows

Campaigns are broadcasts to the contact graph, and results are reported per email, per campaign and per contact, covering delivered, opened and clicked. The homepage shows sample campaign reports with open rates next to each send.

Segments are "Living audience slices": a contact enters or leaves a segment as its data changes, and those entries and exits fire workflows on their own. Workflows are event-triggered and support delays, branches and waits. The homepage example starts on a user.signup event, sends a welcome email, waits two days and then branches on whether the user has created a project. Another line describes a contact entering a segment and receiving three emails, two days apart, "no hands on the controls."

Templates are reusable designs with {{variable}} substitution and version history, so a team can see how a template changed over time.

Deliverability and reputation

Volanea puts a lot of weight on protecting the sender's reputation. Bounce and complaint rates are watched continuously, with graduated enforcement ("warn, throttle, pause") that the homepage says kicks in "before inbox providers punish your domain." The published thresholds are 0 to 4% as healthy, 4 to 10% as warn and throttle, and 10% and above as pause. The homepage also lists a 24h spike detection window, a real-time recheck on every bounce within 15s, and zero silent shutoffs, meaning every enforcement step is visible to the customer. The Reputation guard feature throttles sending automatically when bounce or complaint spikes appear.

Sending identities are verified domains, with DKIM, SPF and DMARC checked against live DNS. Signed webhooks deliver events with HMAC signatures, retries, a full log and one-click replay, which helps when an endpoint was down and events need to be sent again. The site also offers two free tools, a DMARC checker and an email verifier.

Plans and prices

The pricing page opens with "Start free. Upgrade when you scale." Billing is by credits: one email costs one credit, or two if it has an attachment. Credits reset every month and do not roll over.

• Free, $0 a month. 1,000 email credits every month, transactional email, campaigns and automation, the contact graph and deliverability monitoring. No credit card is required.
• Starter, $5 a month. 7,500 email credits every month, everything in Free, plus custom sending domains and open and click tracking. The page marks it as the most popular plan.
• Growth, $20 a month. 50,000 email credits every month, everything in Starter, plus priority deliverability support and a higher monthly quota.
• Scale, $149 a month. 200,000 email credits every month, everything in Growth, plus a priority support queue and the highest monthly quota.

All paid plans can be canceled anytime. The page promises "No overage, no surprises," and for more than 200,000 emails a month it invites customers to "Talk to us about Enterprise." The homepage frames the free grant as "every feature included," while the pricing page lists custom sending domains and open and click tracking from Starter up, so a team that needs its own domain should plan on at least the $5 plan. The footer links a refunds policy alongside the privacy and terms pages.

Documentation and support

The site links documentation, a blog and a "How it works" page, and it publishes migration guides for teams moving over from other providers. Support is tied to the plans: Growth adds priority deliverability support and Scale adds a priority support queue.

Who it suits

Volanea fits SaaS and product teams that send transactional mail from their application and also run campaigns and onboarding sequences, and that want one contact record behind all three. The shared record means an unsubscribe or a bounce from any send is honored everywhere, and segments can start workflows without glue code. Developers get idempotency keys, test-mode keys, signed webhooks with replay and a product-event API. The free plan's 1,000 credits a month is enough to build and test an integration, and the step to Starter at $5 is small. Teams that depend on SMTP should note that the relay is still marked as coming soon, and growing senders should budget by credits, since unused credits do not carry over from one month to the next.