Why is it so expensive to send an email?

sltr

Related question: Why is it so expensive to send (or charge) money? At least in the US

Arnt

I'll suggest a possible answer: vetting customers is expensive, and if you don't vet, Spamhaus vets you.

dcrazy

It was very disorienting to be reading about “Elm development” in the context of e-mail, but having it refer to the language and not the e-mail client from the 1980s.

throwaway81523

It's because of IP reputation and spam blocking. You can't start with a "clean" address and send mail. You need to spend some time on "address warming" to build reputation for the address before the big providers will accept mail from it.

npilk

There are certainly cheaper options than $15 per 1000 emails - I think Amazon's SES is more like $0.10 - $0.20 per 1000.

jonathanbull

CEO of EmailOctopus here (sending multiple billions of emails a year) so I have a bit of experience in this area. As others have mentioned, a lot of the cost comes down to managing IP reputation and deliverability. But there's also the infrastructure needed to send emails at scale, process billions of events (bounces, opens, clicks) and pass those events back to the caller, which all needs to happen within seconds at scale. Most users also expect click tracking, which means more infrastructure, more domains to protect against blocklists, and even more due diligence on who's sending through your platform. That's not to say most providers aren't charging too much, IMO, but it's not quite as simple as it might first seem. That said I haven't come across anyone charging $15 for 1,000 transactional emails, as the OP suggests. Probably a typo. For comparison, SES is $0.10 per 1,000.

jon128

Email is expensive because the tacit permission of the receiver is not handled end to end. Yes, there is actually a way to solve the end to end tacit permission problem, which involves cryptography (obviously). And yes, there is a way to make it ergonomic in a way that users could actually use and understand it well enough that the below-average user would do fine with it. With this problem solved, all of the anti-spam stuff and all the trouble that comes with it becomes obsolete. Until this has happened, email is going to continue suck a lot.