Resend review / friction log
2024-02-07
I've adopted [Resend] (https://resend.com/) for a project. If the Resend team is out there and stumbles across this, I offer this feedback as a gift, nit-picky as it might be.
On the whole I enjoyed it, but the lack of out of the box analytics means I'll probably search around more should I need an email service in the future.
Here are my notes:
- Insanely easy to get to sending an email; I was shocked how quickly I got to hello world.
- Super straight forward when it comes to organizing and formatting an email. It felt like using React on a webpage.
- I don't understand why their batch email caps out at 100 emails; this is perhaps unique to my use case, but I'd like to be able to queue up my entire email list and have them process through it (I'm sending the exact same email to several hundred subscribers).
- Sort of frustrating that you have to already have a domain name to try it out; for this project, haven't yet picked my domain name. Luckily I had one handy I could use.
- Really disappointed in their analytics offering. I need pretty basic metrics (e.g., sends, deliveries, opens, clicks); best would be grouping the emails by subject so I can see how various messages are performing, but even a domain wide view would've been helpful. Instead I had to build this myself using their webhooks offering, which probably cost me more time than I saved in email formatting.
- Along these lines, their webhooks encrpytion, Svix isn't in their docs and I got stuck until I found an implementation example buried in their github repo. It's totally possible that this is my newness as a developer showing through, but given how comprehensive the rest of their documentation related to webhooks is not including this in there feels like an oversight.