Show HN: I turned my email automation tool into a full-fledged email platform

[driaug]

Around 10 months ago, I published a tool I made (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32229278).

I was scouring the market for an affordable and easy-to-use email automation tool, to no avail. The solution? I decided to just build it myself.

Since then, I've added the ability to send transactional and broadcast emails, threw out the subscription pricing and turned it into a usage-based model, etc. In short, turned it into a full-fledged email platform designed for SaaS.

With this post, I would like to share my learnings, findings... Ask any question and I'll answer it to the best of my ability.

Thanks to the feedback of the HN community, I was able to turn this into something that I am still proud of every single day. A sincere thank you from my side.

[williamhyzhang]

This is super cool! Do you have/plan on having integrations where you can pull in contacts from CRMs/email marketing tools for easy onboarding? I think that would be a great value add.

[musb]

Hi Dries,

Plunk is a great example of an end-to-end SaaS application. I would be interested to know if you used a particular framework to implement the multi-tenant SaaS capability when building Plunk?

Thanks,

Mustafa.

[driaug]

I use the built-in capabilities of AWS and Vercel.

https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/projects/domains

[carnewal]

Hey Dries, what was the most challenging part of building Plunk?

[driaug]

Love that one! That would definitely be the carving of my space in the market. There are so many email tools out there, really setting myself apart in the market was a difficult one! In the end, I managed to do it with affordability and DX.

[taubek]

Can you tell me what are transactional and broadcast emails?

[driaug]

That's a great question. The 3 email categories IMO are the following.

- Transactional: one-time emails, sent through an API on-demand (e.g. password resets, magic links...)

- Automations: Repeatable sequences such as onboarding flows with delays and follow-ups

- Broadcasts: Emails sent to a segment of contacts (e.g. newsletters, changelogs...)

[taubek]

Thanks! I might be good to write some content (blog posts) about those different categories and which existing solution could be replaced with your tool.

You do have something covered at https://www.useplunk.com/use-cases but a lot more could be added.

[driaug]

That's actually good feedback. I've been chatting with people who switched providers and am building out comparison pages at the moment!

Thank you so much for the interaction and feedback.

[taubek]

Sure, no problem. I don't have a use case where I could test your app so this kind of feedback is all that I can do :)