Resend

I have recently found a couple of really neat tools specifically designed for developers recently that I have been super happy with and wanted to share. (Caveat - I’m not a developer, but I have been trying to learn a bit more about coding.)

The first one I wanted to mention is called Resend. This is a transactional email service, similar to Sendgrid, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES), Mailgun, Mailchimp Mandrill if that still exists, and many others.

I have been using several different transactional email services over the years. Several have started out pretty well but they have seemingly just gotten really frustrating over the years. For what it’s worth, I primarily use these for sending emails to customers such as an alert, or our service desk holiday hour reminders, or if there’s a big change we’re making in the company and we want to email all our customers or something like that. I don’t particularly like marketing emails, and personally don’t really have any interest in trying to do those, so nothing I am talking about is in the context of how these tools are used for marketing.

Amazon SES is the engine behind many other services people offer, and is likely the largest option out there, but I kind of wonder if they were trying to be sarcastic by naming it “Simple”. It is, like many AWS services, way more complex to set up than it should be, and if/when it has problems they are certainly not going to make it easy to figure out what the problem is or how to fix it.

Sendgrid is what I have been using more recently, and it started out ok, but I swear every time we go in to use it it fights you a little more on what you are trying to do. Whenever I want to send a quick email out to a bunch of customers, it seemed like it would always take 2x or more time than I anticipated. I tried making some scripts to use their API to streamline things, but wow… What a mess.

I wish I remember how I found Resend, but I took a look at their product and it seemed to be saying all the right things to me. It seemed far more simple, straightforward, and designed to do exactly what I was looking to do. I signed up and have been incredibly happy so far.

They posted an article introducing themselves and explaining what they are trying to do and why. So far, this matches the reality for me - Introducing Resend. The documentation is straightforward. The interface when you log in is simple and straightforward. The API’s are easy and make sense, and - This is important - they WORK.

I don’t know exactly how they are doing everything on the backend for this service. For all I know this is just a layer in front of Amazon SES, but honestly, totally fine with me. I love tools like this that are well designed, a pleasure to use, and just make my life easier. If this sounds like something interesting to you, I recommend checking it out!

I have found a couple other tools that to me are in the same camp - Smaller projects designed by developers who want to do something really well, with nice design, and are simple to do what you are trying to do. I plan on writing a few more of these in the coming days.