A crowded market doesn't mean customers have a lot of great options
One of the questions we occasionally get when we tell people about Helo is some version of: "But aren't there already plenty of email services out there?"
Yes, there are. Quite a few, actually.
But here's the thing about a crowded market: a lot of options doesn't necessarily mean a lot of great choices. If you've ever stood in an airport food court, you know what we mean. Plenty of options, none of them make you truly happy.
We think the email sending space is a little like that right now.
An independent alternative in an industry chasing growth at all costs
The email delivery landscape today is largely run by two kinds of companies: VC-backed startups eyeing an exit, and major corporations that have acquired smaller products and, more often than not, made them worse.
Sendgrid got folded into Twilio. Mailgun was acquired by Sinch. Postmark got absorbed by ActiveCampaign. We've yet to see an example where an acquisition made the product—or the experience for the customer—better. What tends to happen instead: less love for customer support and improving the product, more effort spent optimizing for revenue targets. We’ve experienced this as a customer and
Helo is bootstrapped, and we intend to stay that way. We have no investors to impress, no VC partners expecting us to 10x their investment. We're not building toward an exit. Our goal is to build a calm, reliable, independent company that's still around (and still independent!) in 5, 10, 20 years - and we have some pretty radical ideas for ensuring this happens.. That means our only obligation is to you, the people who actually use our product.
Only pay for what you use
Being independent also means we can do stuff that we think is right but that a board of investors would probably never sign off on. One example: only charging you for what you actually use. We don’t force you into fixed arbitrary bundles that make you pay for more than what you really need. Helo's only-pay-for-what-you-use model is straightforward and transparent, and more affordable than the competition.
We also don't gate features behind plan tiers just because we know they're valuable to you. Other providers will lock things like extra sending domains behind a pricier plan. Not because those things cost them more to support, but because they know you need them and will pay to unlock them. Our approach is different: If something doesn't cost us anything extra to provide, we don't charge extra for it either.
Learn more about Helo’s pricing and how we compare to the competition.
Built for platforms who send on behalf of others
Most email providers are built for the general case: a single company sending its own emails to its own customers. That's a well-served market, and Helo is a great fit for that use case as well. But it's not the only one.
We’ve also worked with many product builders who build platforms that send on behalf of their customers. Let’s say you’re building a restaurant management tool and want your restaurant owners to be able to send newsletters from your platform. You suddenly face a whole new set of spicy challenges. If one of your customers is sending spam (urgh!), how do you catch that and ensure that one bad sender doesn’t spoil deliverability for your entire product? How can you make it easy for your users to send from their own domains? How can you display email performance metrics per customer? How can you make sure that recipients that unsubscribe from restaurant A’s newsletters are still receiving mail from restaurant B? The list goes on.
Helo is designed with the platform use case front and center, giving you the tools you need to manage email sending on behalf of your users.
We just really like working together
And then there's a much simpler (and if we're honest, a more selfish) reason: the team behind Helo used to work together at Postmark, and we loved it.
When that chapter ended, we kept talking about how wonderful it'd be to start something new together, building not just on years of email experience, but on everything we'd learned about running a calm workplace and taking real care of customers. So we decided to give it a shot.
There's a real beauty in getting a second chance at rebuilding something you know a lot about, with people you know and trust. The mistakes you can avoid. The things you always said you'd do differently if you ever got to start over. We get to do exactly that with Helo. It's incredibly fun, and we think it makes a better product for you, too.
We’d love to hear from you!
Is our approach resonating with you? Is there something you wish your email sending service would do but it currently can’t? We’d really love to hear about it. Just send us a note.
And of course, if you’d like to give Helo a try, we’d really love that. You can sign up here.