Nobody notices email deliverability until sales drop
Bounces, complaints and the slow drift into spam folders are a reputation problem, and reputation is a property of your domain rather than of any one product. So transactional mail and campaigns go out through the same relay.
· 3 min read
Email deliverability fails silently, which is what makes it expensive. There is no error. The API returns 200, the log says sent, and the message is filed in a spam folder nobody opens. You find out weeks later, from a customer who says they never got the invoice, and by then the pattern is established.
The mechanism underneath is reputation: receiving providers score the sending domain and IP on bounce rates, complaint rates, authentication, volume patterns and how quickly bad addresses are dropped. It is a specialist problem, it moves, and it is nobody in your company’s job.
One relay, because reputation is one thing
The common arrangement is two providers: one for transactional mail, one for marketing. It feels tidy — different volumes, different teams, different tools. It also means your domain’s reputation is being managed in two places by two parties, neither of whom sees the whole picture.
Rutba Send carries both. Your receipts, password resets, invoices and payslips go out on the same relay as your campaigns, so the reputation is managed as one thing — which is what it is, whether or not you split the tooling.
Split your sending across two providers and you have not split the reputation. You have split the view of it.
The suppression list is the product
The least interesting-sounding capability here matters most. Bounces and complaints are suppressed automatically, so a bad address stops costing you reputation after the first failure rather than the fortieth.
And unsubscribes stay honoured everywhere — which, when the same relay carries your campaigns and your invoices, is a meaningfully harder guarantee than it sounds, and the right one.
- A REST API and an SMTP endpoint — send however suits the application.
- Automatic suppression of bounces and complaints.
- Reputation-aware rate control.
- Templated batch sends, with delivery, open and bounce reporting.
Why an SMTP endpoint as well as an API
Because most applications that need to send email already speak SMTP, and rewriting them to call an API is work with no user-visible outcome. Pointing an existing app at the relay changes one config block and nothing else.
An API-only sending service is quietly asking you to fund a migration before you can evaluate it.
Priced so the free tier is actually useful
| Plan | Price | Volume |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Up to 1,000 emails a month — enough to wire it up and go live. |
| Standard | $19 / month | 50,000 emails. |
| Scale | $79 / month | 500,000 emails. |
| Enterprise | Custom, annual | Millions of messages, managed reputation. |
A thousand a month is a real free tier: a small application in production genuinely fits inside it. A hundred-message free tier is a demo allowance dressed as a plan.