We didn’t think email would ever be a problem for our startup. Auth emails, password resets — basic stuff, right? Then one random week users started telling us they couldn’t log in because emails just never arrived. No errors, no warnings, everything “looked fine”. That’s when it hit me how fragile this part actually is.

Had almost the same story last year. Free SMTP worked great during beta, but once real users showed up, things quietly fell apart. The worst part wasn’t even spam — it was emails that simply disappeared. Support tickets piled up, and people assumed our product was broken, not the email layer.

Yeah, transactional email is one of those things you don’t respect until it hurts. We realized we needed something made for startups, not a hacked-together setup. I found this page while researching options and it explained a lot of what we were missing.
https://unione.io/en/email-service-for-startups

What clicked for me was the idea of integrating once and not babysitting deliverability every week. It’s not flashy, but reliability suddenly became way more important than “free”.

Exactly. Users don’t care how modern your stack is if they can’t reset a password. After we fixed email delivery, churn from “can’t log in” basically vanished. It’s wild how such a boring technical detail can affect trust that much.