I've been living off solo SaaS products my entire adult life -- almost 20 years. These are the only services I pay for:

    * AWS and Cloudflare for hosting
    * Rackspace for incoming email
    * Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email
    * Namecheap for domains
    * A merchant account and Spreedly for payments
    * ShareASale to run an affiliate program and pay a percentage commission for referred sales
    * Facebook and Google ads

All customers come from ads, referrals or word of mouth. I don't do any social media or outbound sales.

rawoke083600

>* Sendgrid for transactional/outbound email

All good recommendations ! I would advise/caution AGAINST SendGrid. They have a quite the terrible reputation and my n=1 experience is that over a weekend they suspended my production account without cause !

1) I've been sending the EXACT same mails and number (less than 200-300 a month) to the exact same ppl on their free-tier.

2) I asked to upgraded to a PAID account to get better statistics (opens etc) They came back with saying I'm not a good fit for their org and boom disabled my account which is used in production ! Was a fun weekend switching everything over.

So they were willing to send my mails for 5 years for free and after I wanted to give them money to KEEP sending the EXACT same mail, they basically said bugger off and my production systems were left without an email service !

EDIT1: After searching SendGrid on HN - seems I"m not the only one !

I can recommend PostMark - Brilliant service.

KronisLV

Genuine question: why not just have your own e-mail server with a bit of automation thrown in, something simple like https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

I can understand something like SendGrid or PostMark for the more complex use cases or larger platforms, but surely for a one man SaaS, the simple self-hosted option wouldn't be out of the question either? Interacting with a mail server shouldn't be too hard either, say, with Python or any other general purpose programming language.

Provided, that the IP addresses aren't blacklisted and that a simple VPN is sufficient. Do we live in a world of walled gardens, where the smaller mail servers would just have their mail be discarded, or something?