by chrisfrantz on 9/21/23, 11:48 AM with 137 comments
Email is important but painful to manage. If you've ever dealt with the frustration of coding emails by hand, testing them across multiple clients, or integrating them into various SaaS tools, you might find our approach interesting.
We make it simple to design and send email to your users either manually in the app, via API or triggered via an integration. We offer unlimited team seats, so your product team can help align copy, your marketing team can send newsletters, your revenue team can work on dunning and your engineers can have a solid API to help orchestrate the sends.
Most of our competitors use email editors that are licensed from a third party. Our editor is built from the ground up on the Lexical text editor from Meta, extended beyond just text nodes. It supports mobile editing and dark mode, and it autosaves your changes.
Our REST API is straightforward, and we have integrations with tools like Segment and Census. Documentation is available at https://loops.so/docs. On our homepage, right under the fold, we list endpoints and sample payloads.
One issue we've worked hard to address is email compatibility across devices and platforms. It's a problem full of edge cases that we've mitigated by extending MJML, a markup language designed for responsive email, to be even more compliant across different platforms. We don't think you should have to code and test your emails. Email copy shouldn't live in your codebase.
If you're concerned about spam, we are too. We educate our users on CAN-SPAM rules and automatically add compliant footers to emails. We actively monitor to ensure our platform isn't used for spam, and we do not allow cold sales emails.
Our pricing is upfront and available on our website. You can try the platform for free without a credit card. We launched publicly a week ago. We're really interested in any technical feedback you have, as we aim to make this tool as developer-friendly as possible.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
by santiagobasulto on 9/22/23, 7:44 AM
Contact-based pricing is bad. You’re trying to create an email platform for SaaS, from the features perspective (yey!) but you’re charging just as mailchimp and everybody else does (nah!).
Instead, as a founder, I’d rather prefer “active user”. If someone tries my product, but they never return, I don’t want to be charged for. So, in any given month, count how many people I have emailed (during that period), and that counts as pricing.
Just my 2c. Good luck!
by daniel_sushil on 10/4/23, 9:33 PM
by winrid on 9/22/23, 2:03 AM
by MattyMc on 9/22/23, 2:30 AM
Also: More than 5000 contacts, “CONTACT US”.
by mfkp on 9/22/23, 8:07 AM
by alx-ppv on 9/22/23, 5:46 AM
That's why Sendy is a good option for me.
by adaml_623 on 9/21/23, 4:58 PM
by candiddevmike on 9/21/23, 1:21 PM
FWIW, your service seems priced in a way that encourages spam (send unlimited emails to an address).
by tomahony on 9/22/23, 2:34 PM
It seems the innovation here is making the management, editing and publishing of emails much more streamlined through your interface. That's great as it's definitely a frustration of creating emails.
But in the pricing you are focusing on contacts (and therefore "number of emails sent"). First of all, it's very difficult to guess what "contacts" are when considering transactional emails. What if a new user signs up but never uses the app again? Is that a new contact? If I send one marketing email it could be to 200k contacts, but I may only have 1000 transactional emails/contacts per month.
Instead of focusing the pricing around contacts and "emails sent" why not allow customers to "bring their own email platform". This would absolve you of having to worry about email pricing. A custom can connect SendGrid, MailGun or whatever they want. You can then focus your product on the publishing experience (and probably charge a lot more)
by pembrook on 9/21/23, 1:47 PM
Have some friends also working in a somewhat adjacent space (Audienceful) so will be watching you guys closely.
But in general it seems email is pretty crowded these days and a lot of the sub-niches are also pretty crowded (eg. Klayvio in ecomm, Customer.io in Saas, Substack/ghost in newsletters, Convertkit for wordpress bloggers, etc).
And for the most part all these apps are just sending on the big API-based senders under the hood (Eg. Amazon SES or Sendgrid). Even the newcomer API-based senders like Resend are just a wrapper around Amazon SES. Which makes any claims around differentiated deliverability on any email platform dubious at best.
Is the plan to build your own sending infra long term?
by rusl1 on 9/21/23, 7:24 PM
by xmattx on 9/21/23, 12:46 PM
Runs kinda counter to your business-case I suppose, but might help someone (me) out :)
by acomms on 9/21/23, 1:10 PM
by petecooper on 9/21/23, 12:57 PM
I understand the reasoning for it being there, but perhaps kick it further down the page so the service / offering is the focus.
by o-o- on 9/21/23, 7:46 PM
* A user-friendly WYSIWYG template editor (web fonts = nice to have but not crucial). * An API that lets me set the to-address and the e-mail content in markdown.
How can this pose an edge case?!
by mtmail on 9/21/23, 1:27 PM
by a-l-e-c on 9/21/23, 11:12 PM
Had cases where the exact same campaign or template had to be created multiple times due to the client wanting a slightly different intro/closing or even entirely different products and services promoted based on user/account preferences.
Sure, it could be managed with multiple campaigns/templates/lists but these duplications could easily be avoided by using slightly more advanced "segmentation logic".
This is usually the case where tracking/stats aren't that important but rather making sure the user receives relevant content.
by kylegalbraith on 9/22/23, 3:30 PM
I think there are some logic things to get right at the API level, like should I use events or contact properties to trigger loops? We're working on some of that and wish the guidance was a bit better/clearer. At the moment, any properties you send with an event get added to the contact, so it seems like contact properties are the way to go.
My last request would be to support array properties on contacts, as a given contact could be in multiple "things".
by Multiplayer on 9/21/23, 1:43 PM
by wallawe on 9/21/23, 3:05 PM
by amilner42 on 9/21/23, 2:44 PM
I will say I find the pricing quite concerning. Free until 1000, 50 / 5000, but then I have to contact you? Am I understanding correctly, 5000 subscribed users doesn’t seem like that much.
For what it’s worth I went to customer.io to compare pricing and found there’s so confusing I was lazy to figure it out…so I do appreciate the simplicity
by j45 on 9/21/23, 7:25 PM
This is a neat concept - reminds me in some ways of mailgun when they were able to take a spin on email hosting to allow multiple domains relatively cheap but measure the number of emails.
I'll be signing up at least two things I can try it out with. The pricing information seems limited at present - until you realize it says 5000 poeple. Having one more paid category listed would be ideal.
by danr4 on 9/21/23, 5:15 PM
by Maultasche on 9/21/23, 5:32 PM
I was looking for an API reference to see what I could do with your API, but didn't find one. It seems that information about API calls is scattered among more "how-to" oriented documentation. That's just fine, but it would also be nice to have some documentation oriented around endpoints and details of the API.
by risico on 9/21/23, 2:56 PM
I'll be keeping a closed eye to you guys, it's pretty much what I wanted when I started my project.
by technovangelist on 9/22/23, 4:44 AM
by CrackpotGonzo on 9/21/23, 5:57 PM
by aresant on 9/21/23, 5:28 PM
by obeavs on 9/21/23, 4:24 PM
How has your experience been using Lexical? Would love to get a sense of where you've run into limitations/etc as we're exploring it (albeit, for a very different use case).
by kevsim on 9/21/23, 1:46 PM
And to nerd out a bit - how was working with Lexical? We chose Slate.js for our editor in Kitemaker.co but it's not as actively maintained as it once was.
by akayaian on 9/21/23, 4:12 PM
by deofoo on 9/21/23, 2:10 PM
by colesantiago on 9/21/23, 4:41 PM
Just a few questions, how does this compare to Substack, Beehiiv, Mailchimp, etc, looking to create an automated newsletter, will Loops work for this usecase?
by kareemm on 9/21/23, 12:40 PM
by itsjustjordan on 9/22/23, 2:10 AM
by hknmtt on 9/22/23, 5:29 AM
by MPiccinato on 9/21/23, 2:25 PM
Any plans to support multiple channels? (SMS, push, etc) And are you in the long run looking to compete with Braze, Airship, etc?
by sourabh03agr on 9/22/23, 9:48 AM
by jorddd on 9/22/23, 2:06 AM
by orliesaurus on 9/22/23, 12:28 AM
by marban on 9/21/23, 2:35 PM
by jqpabc123 on 9/21/23, 12:37 PM
by owfwduke on 9/21/23, 10:05 PM
by satvikpendem on 9/21/23, 3:45 PM
I like them because they integrate quite nicely with their other product, React Email [1], where our devs can just write emails in React and it'll render to email-compliant HTML and CSS. I suppose you guys have a GUI as well but I believe they're looking to add that too.
by nicoraga on 9/21/23, 5:41 PM
Happy to share how we use it.
by smca on 9/21/23, 2:16 PM
by codegeek on 9/21/23, 6:59 PM
by luthfur on 9/21/23, 7:03 PM