Surprising how poor the reception for this kind of research is.. it's 2019, porn/adult entertainment is a huge industry. I'd expect the tech industry at least to be more open to discussing it.
I would be very cautious using Anymailfinder.com to generate email lists -- based on this copy on anymailfinder.com:
Anymail finder uses many approaches to find emails—it searches billions of web pages and performs direct server validation.
The original SMTP spec allows for email address validation, and there are tricks like opening an SMTP connection to a mail server and dropping it half way if the address is verified -- but these are the same "tricks" that spammers use, so many mail servers disable or report false positives. There's a reason why most lead services have a high price: they have actually verified an email address.
Next, sending cold emails to business is OK (sometimes annoying but legally ok), but the copy on makesmail.com has a broken link (1) and doesn't clearly describe how to cold email and be legally compliant. From the horses mouth: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can...
Regardless, congratulations on building up to $1,500 MRR, that is a milestone most side projects never reach!
For running a developer event like BattleSnake.io, C9 is amazing.
After a few years of headaches trying to help students get their local dev environments setup, we started recommending Cloud9 to all Students. Definitely the way of the future.
That's fair feedback (pricing is per recipient), but it reflects the cost of running our service (we store data about your customers long term, which adds up more than the cost of each individual send).
I'm biased (as the cofounder), but I strongly believe that you should treat email delivery as a commodity and use a product like Sendwithus.com on top of it.
If you want to enjoy SendGrid deliverability but a different interface, check us out: sendwithus.com
We're designed as a higher level on top of email deliverability, offering some pretty rich features (email storing, great A/B testing, drip campaigns...)
Hey folks, cofounder of Sendwithus.com here -- we're a layer on top of Mandrill, SendGrid, Sparkpost, etc. You can hot swap backends with us, making a change trivial. We're also experts on all these platforms so can advice cost vs support.
Hit our support team ([email protected]) if you have any questions, we have a super rich feature set that goes beyond what these products provide.
Happy to discuss discounts for folks making the switch to us, email me: [email protected]
We do this (Sendwithus.com) -- not only see email with all personalization, but see it on the device a customer used (was the link really broken on an iPhone?)
Matt here, Sendwithus founder -- Live Chat is great, but it's really important to consider that most of the "big hacks" in the news are the result of social engineering.