Almost every email platform sells you two things in one bill: software that decides what to send, and infrastructure that actually sends it. Bundling them is convenient, and it is also why your bill climbs every time your list does — even in months when you use the software exactly as much as before.
We think those two things should be priced separately, because they are two different products with two different cost curves.
The software cost does not scale with volume
The work SendNectar does for a hundred thousand contacts is roughly the work it does for ten thousand: hold the brands apart, evaluate segments, enforce consent, compile audiences, run workflow steps, ingest provider events, score reputation. That cost grows with the complexity of what you are orchestrating — number of brands, number of active workflows, number of events processed — and barely at all with the raw number of messages.
Delivery is the opposite. Every additional message is a real, marginal cost: an SMTP transaction, an IP with a reputation to protect, a bounce to process. That cost genuinely does scale per email.
Bundling them means the flat cost gets billed on the variable meter. You end up paying software margin on delivery volume, forever.
What “bring your own provider” actually means
You connect an account you own — Amazon SES, SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Brevo, or plain SMTP — and SendNectar dispatches through it. Concretely:
- Your credentials are submitted to a dedicated endpoint and encrypted server-side. They are never returned by the API and never bundled into browser code.
- A connection test validates the provider against real health checks before it handles production mail.
- Sending routes distribute traffic by priority and weight, per message class, with a designated fallback.
- Rate limits and max concurrency are set per connection, so you stay inside what your provider account actually permits.
The bill for the messages arrives from your provider, at your provider’s rate. Ours arrives from us, for the orchestration.
The part people underestimate: reputation
Unbundling is usually pitched as a pricing argument, and it is. But the durable benefit is that sending reputation accrues to you.
On bundled infrastructure you share IP space with every other sender on the platform. When a neighbour’s list practices go bad, your delivery rate absorbs part of the consequence, and you have neither visibility into the cause nor a lever to pull. When the domains and the provider account are yours, the reputation you build is an asset you keep — and if you ever leave us, you keep it then too.
That last part is deliberate. A platform that owns your sending reputation owns your ability to leave.
What it costs you
Honesty requires the other column. Bring-your-own-provider means:
- You set up a provider account and verify domains. That is an afternoon, not a minute.
- At genuinely low volume, a bundled plan is often cheaper than a provider bill plus a subscription. The model pays off as you grow.
- Two vendors means two invoices and two support contacts.
If you run one brand at low volume, a bundled platform is a reasonable choice and we will say so. The unbundled model is built for the operator running several brands, where the software complexity is high and the volume is high enough that the markup starts to hurt.
Where the meter actually sits
We bill on four things: active brands, stored contacts, active workflows, and processed events. We do not bill on emails sent, on any plan, at any tier. That is not an introductory position we intend to revisit — it is the reason the product is shaped the way it is.