We never planned to build an email service. But we spent years watching small businesses overpay for basic infrastructure, and at some point, frustration turns into anger, and anger turns into a product.
Dear small business owner,
I need to tell you something that’s been on my mind for years.
You’re paying too much for email. Not because you picked the wrong provider. Not because you didn’t shop around. You’re overpaying because the entire email delivery industry decided that basic infrastructure should cost like premium software. And nobody pushed back.
Until now.
My name is Jewel. I lead the team at WPManageNinja. We built FluentCRM, FluentForm, FluentSMTP and other Fluent ecosystem plugins for small businesses. Over the past several years, we’ve worked with tens of thousands of small businesses. WordPress site owners, e-commerce operators, freelancers, agencies, local shops trying to build an online presence.
Every single one of them hits the same wall: sending email costs too much and makes too little sense.
toSend is our answer. But before I tell you what it is, let me explain why it exists.
The conversation that started everything
Two years ago, a FluentCRM user sent us a support ticket. She ran a small pottery studio in Portland. Taught classes, sold pieces online, used FluentCRM to manage her email list. Maybe 3,000 subscribers. She sent a weekly newsletter and automated order confirmations.
Her question wasn’t about FluentCRM. It was about the email provider we’d recommended she connect to. She’d been using Mailgun’s Basic plan at $15/month, sending about 12,000 emails a month. Her business was growing. She was about to cross Mailgun’s threshold and would need to jump to the Foundation plan at $35/month.
“That’s more than I pay for my bookkeeping software,” she wrote. “And bookkeeping actually does something complicated. Email just… sends a message.”
She was right. That sentence stuck with me.
Email is infrastructure. But it’s priced like a product.
Think about the other infrastructure your business depends on.
Electricity. You pay for what you use. Nobody charges you a monthly minimum for kilowatt-hours or locks “premium electricity” behind a higher tier. The power company doesn’t care what you plugged in.
Water. Same model. Use more, pay more. Use less, pay less. No annual contracts. No feature gating.
But email delivery? The act of routing a message from your server to someone’s inbox? That’s infrastructure. It’s plumbing. It’s the pipe that carries your order confirmation from your website to your customer’s Gmail. The technical work is well-understood, well-optimized, and honestly, not that expensive to provide.
AWS charges $0.10 per 1,000 emails through SES. That’s the raw infrastructure cost. A penny per hundred emails. The actual cost of putting a message on the internet is almost nothing.
So why does SendGrid charge $19.95/month for their entry plan? Why does Mailgun charge $35 for 50,000 emails?
Because they can.
Because the market expects it. Because the first wave of email API providers set prices when the technology was newer and harder, and nobody adjusted downward as the infrastructure got cheaper. Because investors expect revenue growth, and the easiest way to grow revenue is to charge more as your customers grow.
I call this the success tax. And it’s the single most frustrating dynamic in small business software.
The success tax
Here’s how the success tax works. When your business is small, email costs are manageable. Maybe $15-$20 a month. Annoying, but survivable.
Then your business grows. More customers. More orders. More emails. You cross a plan threshold and suddenly you’re at $35. Then $50. Then $90. Your email volume doubled, but your costs quadrupled. The pricing tiers aren’t linear. They’re designed to squeeze maximum revenue at each growth stage.
The cruelest part? The emails you’re sending at 100,000/month cost the provider no more to deliver than the ones you sent at 10,000/month. Scale makes email delivery cheaper for them. Economies of scale. Better infrastructure utilization. Lower per-unit cost.
But those savings go to the provider’s margin, not to you. You pay more. They pay less. Your success funds their growth, not yours.
I’ve watched this happen to hundreds of businesses using our Fluent products. A FluentCRM user starts with a small list, connects an affordable provider, builds their audience, and then right when they’re finding their footing, their email costs jump.
Some downgrade their sending frequency. Some stop sending newsletters entirely. Some switch to cheaper providers and spend a weekend migrating, losing momentum at exactly the moment they should be accelerating.
That’s not just a pricing problem. That’s a growth tax on small businesses. And it benefits no one except the email companies.
What we already knew
We didn’t come to this problem as outsiders. WPManageNinja has been building tools for small businesses for more than a decade.
FluentCRM: A self-hosted email marketing automation plugin for WordPress. Thousands of businesses use it to manage contacts, send campaigns, build automations. Powerful, affordable, WordPress-native.
FluentForm: One of the most popular form builders in the WordPress ecosystem. Contact forms, surveys, order forms, registration forms. Powering 600,000+ businesses.
FluentSMTP: A free WordPress plugin that connects your site to any email delivery provider. We built it because WordPress’s default email function is notoriously unreliable, and small business owners needed a simple way to route email through a proper provider.
FluentSMTP was the turning point.
Building that plugin meant we had to deeply understand every email provider’s API. The pricing, the limitations, all the little quirks. We integrated with SendGrid, Mailgun, Postmark, Amazon SES, and more. We saw the pricing pages. We heard the complaints. We fielded support tickets from users frustrated by overage charges, feature limitations, and cost jumps.
We knew the problem from every angle. We knew the infrastructure cost. We knew what small businesses needed. And we knew what they were being charged.
The gap between those two numbers was just… wrong.
The decision
In late 2024, we started asking ourselves a simple question: what if we just built it?
We built it on Amazon SES. The same infrastructure the biggest companies in the world rely on. But raw SES is not a product. It’s a firehose. So we built everything else around it: deliverability optimization, spam protection, domain management, real-time analytics, email logs, webhooks. All the things that turn raw infrastructure into something a small business owner can actually use without hiring a DevOps engineer.
We did the math. At $0.30 per 1,000 emails, we could build a sustainable business. Not a venture-funded rocket ship chasing billion-dollar valuations. A real business that makes money by being useful and honest.
$0.30 per thousand is three times the raw AWS cost. That covers our dashboard, delivery optimization, spam protection, email logs, webhooks, domain management, real-time analytics, support, and ongoing development. It keeps the lights on and the team paid.
It also means a small business sending 10,000 emails pays $3 instead of $15-$20.
That’s not a loss leader. That’s not a free tier designed to hook you before the real price kicks in. That’s the actual price. Today, tomorrow, whether you send ten thousand or ten million.
What toSend is (and what it isn’t)
toSend is an email delivery service. You send emails through us, whether that’s transactional messages like order confirmations and password resets, or marketing emails like newsletters and promotions. We make sure they reach the inbox.
What you get: AWS-powered sending infrastructure. Deliverability optimization baked in from day one. Multiple domain management. Real-time delivery insights so you know what happened to every email. Complete email logs you can search and filter. Webhook support for integrating with your systems. Spam protection that keeps your sender reputation clean.
What you pay: $0.30 per 1,000 emails. Buy credits when you need them, use them when you’re ready. No monthly subscription. No annual contract. No tier to upgrade to.
What we’re not: we’re not trying to replace your marketing automation platform. FluentCRM does that. We’re not trying to be your form builder. FluentForm handles that. toSend does one thing well. Deliver email. And charge fairly for it.
We’re in beta right now. Over 100 businesses are using toSend, testing it, sending through it daily. The feedback has been encouraging. More importantly, it’s been honest. People tell us what needs fixing. We fix it. That’s how you build something real.
The philosophy behind the price
I want to explain something that might sound naive. But I believe it deeply.
At WPManageNinja, we believe software infrastructure should get cheaper as it matures. The longer a technology exists, the more efficient it becomes. Those efficiency gains should be shared with customers. Not hoarded by providers.
Email delivery in 2026 is not the same as email delivery in 2012, when SendGrid was scaling up and the infrastructure genuinely cost more. The technology is mature. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure have driven infrastructure costs to historic lows. Deliverability best practices are well-documented. The hard problems have been solved.
But prices haven’t come down. In many cases, they’ve gone up. SendGrid is more expensive now than it was five years ago. Mailgun has added tiers and increased plan costs. The industry is charging 2026 prices for infrastructure that costs a fraction of what it did when those prices were set.
We think that’s wrong. Not in a “they’re evil” way. These are legitimate businesses employing smart people doing good work. But the market can do better. Competition should drive prices toward the actual cost of delivery. It hasn’t, because providers have mostly competed on features and developer experience, not on price.
toSend competes on price. Not by cutting corners. Our infrastructure is the same AWS backbone that enterprise companies rely on. We compete by choosing a business model that works at lower margins with higher volume.
Here’s the thing most email providers can’t say: we don’t need toSend to pay our bills. WPManageNinja is already a profitable, sustainable company. FluentCRM, FluentForm, FluentSupport, Ninja Tables. Over a million WordPress installations. We built toSend because it needed to exist, not because we needed another revenue stream. We don’t have investors demanding 10x returns. Nobody is pressuring us to raise prices next quarter. We can afford to charge what’s fair because our company doesn’t depend on overcharging you.
We’d rather send a billion emails at $0.30 per thousand than a hundred million at $0.90 per thousand. Both generate the same revenue. But the first model serves ten times more businesses.
That’s not charity. It’s a business choice. One rooted in a belief that more small businesses succeeding is better for everyone. Including us.
To the pottery studio in Portland
I don’t know if the woman who sent that support ticket will ever read this. But this is for her. And for every small business owner who’s looked at an email bill and felt that twinge of resentment.
You shouldn’t have to think about email costs.
You should set up your delivery provider once, forget it exists, and get back to the thing you actually care about. Your craft. Your customers. Your work.
Email is the pipe. Not the product. And pipes should be cheap.
We built toSend because we’ve spent years watching small businesses get squeezed by an industry that confused infrastructure with luxury. We built it because we had the technical knowledge, the existing ecosystem, and honestly, the frustration to do something about it.
10,000 emails for $3. That’s the whole story.
No asterisks. No “starting at.” No “with annual billing.” Three dollars.
We think that’s what honesty looks like.
Try it
toSend is in beta. It’s not perfect. We’re improving it every week based on real feedback from real businesses.
If you’re currently paying $15, $35, $90 a month to send emails, come see what $3 to $30 feels like instead.
If you’re a WordPress user running FluentCRM or FluentSMTP, the integration is already there. Connect in minutes.
If you’re on a different platform, our API works with anything. Setup is fast.
We’re not asking you to trust our marketing. We’re asking you to try the product, check the invoice, and decide for yourself whether your current provider is worth 3-6x more.
I think you already know the answer.
With respect and a little impatience,
Shahjahan Jewel
Founder, WPManageNinja
toSend: Email delivery at $0.30 per 1,000 emails. Pay-as-you-go. Every feature is included. No tiers. Built by the FluentCRM and FluentSMTP team. Start at tosend.com.
