How to stop your email bill growing with your user list

Why the usual way fails

Email platforms charge per contact because it is simple to explain and it grows with your success. The cost of actually delivering an email is tiny, but the platform fee sits on top and climbs in steps as you cross each tier. Moving away feels hard, because your users live in your own database and the platform needs a copy kept in sync, with its own import jobs and duplicates. And once templates, unsubscribe lists and segments live in one tool, switching feels risky, so teams keep paying. Every month the bill gets a little bigger, and the question of whether it is worth it gets pushed to next quarter, then the one after that, while the invoice keeps climbing.

How Rowsend helps

Rowsend is a desktop app for Mac that reads contacts straight from your own database and sends through your own email provider, such as Amazon SES, Postmark, Mailgun or SMTP. You pay once for the app, with the first 300 licenses at $20 and the price never going past $49, and Rowsend adds no markup to your sends, so delivery costs what your provider charges. Its own comparison for a 10,000-contact list puts the first year at $158, including the app, a year of optional Cloud and SES sending, against $1,188 with Loops. The connection to your database uses a login that cannot write, and you build segments from your own data, such as paid users active in the last 30 days. Unsubscribes, one-click headers and bounce handling are built in, so you do not have to rebuild them. A 7-day trial needs no card.

Step by step

1. Download Rowsend for Mac and start the 7-day trial.
2. Connect your database, such as Supabase, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB or Firebase.
3. Connect your email provider, for example Amazon SES.
4. Build a segment from your own data.
5. Write the email in the editor or paste your HTML.
6. Send a test, then send or schedule the campaign.

Tips

• Work out what you pay per year today and divide it by the emails you actually send. The number often surprises people.
• Warm up a new sending domain slowly, so inbox providers learn to trust it.
• Set a daily limit if your provider caps you, so a big campaign does not fail halfway.
• Use topics so people can leave one kind of email without leaving all of them. You keep more of your list that way.

Questions