Reply to dasGuteDaran

The part of our FAQ for Sumo-lings that mentions Sendy is informative here regarding Acelle:

https://docs.emaildelivery.com/docs/faq/appsumo-select-faq

It's true that Acelle comes with payment gateways and signup plans and whatnot out of the box, and we only come with some of those things, we've been replying about this frequently.

We used to run this product as a SaaS and we had all of that: Chargebee/Stripe, signup pages, free trials, plans with limits on them and various ways to restrict people's accounts. It's all still there in the code, but most of it is hidden because it's not user-friendly for customers of the product to use yet, it was all created just for our own internal use and wasn't' for anyone else to see but us.

However, the Sumo-lings have made it clear they want all these things, so we will be dusting them off and restoring them in a user-friendly way, in the meantime, we will try to give people the tools they need to accomplish these things themselves, for instance, we're posting a documentation page soon on how to hook up your own signup page using our undocumented API that can automatically create customer accounts for you that come with the daily sending restrictions and free trials still in the UI right now.

The idea behind this product was for "Done For You" agencies who charge a lot of money per month to do concierge services, bring someone in through a sales process, create their account for them, set up all their delivery, and customize their account to their preferences. It's a far better business model than catering to small dollar accounts that are signups from strangers, who tend to use fake websites, fake blogs, and fake products and are hoping the ESP is poorly configured and asleep at the switch so they can just blast spam out under the radar before getting kicked off.

Regarding your contingency, I refer to this as the piano falling on us issue here:

https://appsumo.com/products/emaildelivery/questions/what-is-your-long-term-commitment-to-dev-1279009/#1279020

Contingency on the engineering side would be someone stepping in from our professional circle, contingency for the product side (me) may be everyone finding out that I was secretly useless the entire time 😁

I will need to write up a detailed comparison of us vs Acelle, it's a bad idea to just flippantly say you're better than another product without making really careful and thoughtful comparisons while also looking to highlight the areas that show where your own product could be making improvements compared to your competitor.

I will just say Acelle and our product were designed for entirely different markets and user stories, everything about this product was built with people in mind who spend something like 25k-100k or more per year on email marketing.

However, it works just as great for those who are also in the Acelle demo.