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Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

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Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#251

Post by bagels »

theallan wrote: post #85
zenorocha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! Most front-end teams are using React nowadays. What happens when you adopt another email service is that they want you to learn the template language that they use - Handlebars, Mustache, etc. Instead of having to learn how to do things with that language, your front-end team can re-use everything they already know from React land. Imagine being able to import the same button you have on your web app into your…

I think the confusion is coming from the framing of "Email API for Developers Using React" as the title for this post. React has nothing to do with "an email API" as far as I can see. Your web-site is more clear in that it shows a Node.js snippet (and other environments, although funnily not just in the browser?). Then the site goes on to talk about the React components. Perhaps "Email API for Developers, with React…

Thank you, that's a lot more clear. I was going to click through to find out how they protect the mail server secrets when sending emails from the react based client.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#252

Post by pembrook »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #226
mightytravels wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SES reputation is medium at best. But they allow everyone to send emails so you get what you pay for...

Which competitor has the best reputation for transactional mails?

Email is old and established, so basically you get what you pay for.

We’ve found deliverability to correlate directly with the price of the service we’re using.

The cheaper the company offers access to a sending IP, the lower the quality of people using it, since price is the number 1 factor for spammers (a necessity since untargeted cold email spam has low conversion rates).

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#253

Post by autonomousErwin »

pelcg wrote: post #30

> Why? When you look at all the biggest competitors like Sendgrid, Mailgun, Postmark, and SparkPost, you'll notice that they were all founded around 2009/2010, and they all have been acquired by now. Because of that, it's common to see them only prioritizing enterprise requirements and optimizing for sales-led growth. So does this mean that Resend won't get acquired? What is your exit strategy other than an acquisiti…

I think this might be a future pattern for a certain group of startups. Company X creates something useful and then gets a acquired but because of natural bureaucracy of large companies Company X slows innovation.

In comes...Company Y who can rapidly innovate for a few years until inevitably they also get acquired, then comes Company Z who has the same logic for starting as Company Y and on it goes.

This isn't necessarily a bad pattern for either the founders (they get an exit) or the consumers (they get a brief period of innovation). Give it a couple of years and I imagine we'll be getting Resend's successor.

As for Resend themselves, I think they're absolutely right - the email APIs today for non-enterprise businesses are ugly and opaque and if they can solve this, all the best to them and if I prefer them to current providers I'd be happy to be a customer.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#254

Post by Rapzid »

mediumdeviation wrote: post #209
zenorocha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! Most front-end teams are using React nowadays. What happens when you adopt another email service is that they want you to learn the template language that they use - Handlebars, Mustache, etc. Instead of having to learn how to do things with that language, your front-end team can re-use everything they already know from React land. Imagine being able to import the same button you have on your web app into your…

FWIW the Tailwind implementation in react-email is not well done. The code double render React to static markup just to parse it into DOM then parse out the style and className attributes using a lot of regex https://github.com/resendlabs/react-email/blob/main/packages... . It's likely to be brittle and also very slow - slow enough to almost cause an incident when we tried to use it in production because emails were…

So weird, not sure what all the requirements are. I might just call "getComputedStyles" on the DOM elements and use that to generate inline styles for all the elements.

I have to imagine there are existing tools for all this..

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#255

Post by Rapzid »

andris9 wrote: post #91
codersfocus wrote: post #6

I think if you’re targeting developers, SES is your biggest competitor. Their very cheap pay as you go pricing is more attractive than your monthly pricing. If email templates with react is your usp, I think I’ve seen libraries that offer that already.

Resend seems to be a UI layer on top of SES, so it is probably not a competitor. People could use SES directly, but if the target group for Resend is a “modern front-end dev” then they probably do not want to, or do not know how to, and thus need that UI layer. For example, I maintain a popular email sending library (Nodemailer) and if I could get a penny any time some user files an issue with something that is clear…

> but if the target group for Resend is a “modern front-end dev” then they probably do not want to, or do not know how to, and thus need that UI layer.

I find it hard to believe there are a ton of this persona calling shots on what email service to be paying for..

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#257

Post by KomoD »

ttul wrote: post #236
KomoD wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this work if we don't need to validate domain?

We have a lot of anti-spam capabilities in the platform and if you abuse the service to send actual spam, your account may be rate limited or blocked. But if what you are sending is good email and we don't see signals to indicate it is abusive, then there aren't any limits on how much you can send.

But SPF and DKIM, how do I configure that?

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#258

Post by quickthrower2 »

zenorocha wrote: post #23
paxys wrote: post #16

Help me understand the React selling point. Existing email sending software supports text and HTML because that's what email is . No email client out there supports JavaScript, virtual DOMs, event loops, SSR or any such fancy web technology. Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with etc I'm supposed to use your custom React components ( ...) which you will promptly compile down to the tags I mentioned above. So.…

Sure! Most front-end teams are using React nowadays. What happens when you adopt another email service is that they want you to learn the template language that they use - Handlebars, Mustache, etc. Instead of having to learn how to do things with that language, your front-end team can re-use everything they already know from React land. Imagine being able to import the same button you have on your web app into your…

I think the people that will love this are NextJS/Vercel people, who have decided React is for them for 1. Frontend, 2. Backend, 3. Build Time, and now want to add 4. Emails, and might want to reuse that component they carefully crafted for emails too.

I reckon if you become another integration in Vercel, and maybe a option to install your open source react.email is presented when installing Next, that could go a long way.

I almost drunk the React everywhere coolaid (and have some NextJS projects) but not sure it is for me for various reasons (personal preferences), but plenty of people love that way of developing.

Another thing, thinking of living the future. You mention deliverability. Nothing more deliverable than avoiding email all together. (You are not an email company). Will Gen Alpha use email much? That's all I'll say - something to think about.

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#259

Post by whstl »

austin-cheney wrote: post #241
whstl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Instead of hand-crafting an HTML template with etc" You forgot a whole lot of , all the inline CSS and all the IE11 comment hacks. Oh, and also OfficeHTML or whatever abomination that is called, because Microsoft Word 2003 also remains alive inside Outlook. Most people doing anything of medium complexity is already using some abstraction layer, such as MJML [1]. Also remember you gotta either test on multiple client…

Please stop the insanity. HTML is not designed to work over email and is not capable of describing an email thread, a conversation. Aside from that HTML over email is ridiculously trivial. Super trivial. It isn't the HTML that is challenging but the CSS over email that is challenging. It takes some practice to figure out, but if you are even remotely competent you DO NOT need table insanity. Tables are for tabular da…

When you have absolute freedom to design the emails around the limitations, sure, that works and is certainly much better than the soup of tables and IE11/Office stuff.

However even with that you still gotta test on multiple clients.

If you want to use something like border-radius, for example, it won't work on some versions of Outlook, for example [1]. You either show a slightly different layout or you use workarounds. There are plenty of other examples like that.

I personally just use very simple emails, so it's

and etc. But other people have to work around those limitations, and not everyone is a developer with design knowledge that can tweak the design to a point where it is both simple and good looking.

[1] https://www.caniemail.com/search/?s=radius

Re: Launch HN: Resend (YC W23) – Email API for developers using React

#260

Post by 101008 »

jacobobryant wrote: post #214

FYI, the site is returning a 500 error currently. Anyway, re: the substance of your post--I've used a few email services for the handful of small web apps I develop. I'm currently on Postmark and I really like it. You state "Nobody is building an exceptional developer experience" and "There isn't a single developer-first email platform in the market today", and I have to disagree. Postmark has great developer experie…

I've been also a customer of Postmark for years and I am delighted with the experience. I feel a bit attacked when reading the original post as well.
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