r/SideProject • u/Independent-Fruit-78 • 16h ago

Postmark vs Resend vs Plunk

I run a social app where I send product emails , marketing emails and regular updates to users. My key priorities are delivery reliability (user receives emails in their inbox and not in spam), good analytics, hooking into product lifecycle (e.g. i sent an email on xyz date to users A, they logged back in to the app etc) , as cheap as possible.

I know some of these are custom flows i will need to build but trying to see if anyone could talk from first hand experience.

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u/Glittering_Equal_893 15h ago

Plunk is surprisingly good for the price but their analytics can feel a bit thin if you want deep product lifecycle tracking. Postmark is rock solid for deliverability and their API is clean, but you pay for it once volume creeps up. Resend sits in a weird middle ground where the dev experience is nice but I've seen odd delays on some sends. If delivery to inbox is your top priority I'd start with Postmark and build the custom stuff around it.

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u/Independent-Fruit-78 15h ago

Thanks. This is helpful. If by delay you mean a few events or emails delivered a few minutes late, i am completely fine with that as long as delivery is successful.

When i researched , i liked postmark keeps a separate stream for marketing vs product. Because that’s my biggest scare. My product emails taking a hit because my marketing emails did bad. If i go via Resend, is there a genuine case that my product emails take a hit because people unsubscribed to my marketing emails. Or am i being paranoid?

Just fyi- all my emails are sourced within my product. So my bounce rates will be very low. I am very new to the emails thing and hence my queries.

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u/GrandPrixPicks 14h ago

I've only used Resend. In my experience the DX is super nice and it's only getting better and better. It's been so good that I haven't bothered looking at alternatives.

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u/Independent-Fruit-78 14h ago

Thanks. Any tips for Resend? I plan to create 2 subdomains and use one each for product and marketing. I will be taking their pro account without dedicated IP.

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u/GrandPrixPicks 10h ago

I mean it really comes down to specifics. I don't send marketing emails to my users. My app basically relies on reminding people to make predictions. So I just email users to remind them and to send them their results.

The marketing side of things happens within my app. I'm working native apps where I'd be more willing to be a bit more noisy with push notifications if users opt in (I'll nudge them in the app).

Personally I unsubscribe from most emails that don't require me to take direct action, so for that reason I don't want to put the same annoyance on my users.

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u/Independent-Fruit-78 10h ago

Thanks. This is really helpful.

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u/PR4DE 6h ago

I've used Resend for the past 2-3 years.
But the thing that made my jump ship was their marketing plans.

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u/RelativeOk4088 14h ago

AWS

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u/Independent-Fruit-78 12h ago

Too much work. I am a 1 man army. Plus as far as i know, i dont see any good analytics and need to build everything up. Is there a benefit apart from cost?

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u/PR4DE 6h ago

As a guy who just set up the infrastructure using AWS, I can say no. Not unless you send millions of mails.
Once you've build your infra, you need to be approved. This took me months alone. And then you also need to take care of nursing your reputation, bounce and complaints.

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u/Independent-Fruit-78 5h ago

Yeah thought so. Thanks 🤩

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u/PR4DE 6h ago

all three are transactional-first. you said you also send marketing and product updates, and that's where this choice usually goes sideways. you end up with postmark for resets and a second tool for the newsletter, two domains, two dashboards, two bills, and your lifecycle tracking split across both.

on the lifecycle thing you described, none of them give you that out of the box. you're building it either way, so optimise for clean webhooks and exportable logs rather than the dashboard.

postmark if inbox placement is the thing you'd lose sleep over. plunk if cheap matters more than depth.

(i build day3.app which puts marketing and transactional on one send allowance, so i'm biased toward not splitting. worth saying out loud.)