Alternatives
Products that do what After 10 years my side project has hit $8k/mo in revenue does
Back in 2010 I had an idea for a service that would allow people to easily create semi-permanent email aliases so that they could give an email address to people and websites without revealing their real email address. These aliases will continue to work indefinitely unless you choose to block them. My brother and I spent a few months building the initial version and launched the website in July 2010. For the first year we had about 50 signups per month, by 2013 this had increased to 1500 and it's currently around 3500 per month. Similarly, our revenue grew consistently but slowly - doubling…
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It's been a long slow hog and I almost gave up a few times (more than a few) but when covid hit this year it gave me some time to really focus on my product. There were stupid user journey things that I knew needed fixed. There were some features I knew needed added. And I knew the pricing was wrong. I spent some hardcore time working on these things back in March / April and since then my MRR has continued to grow. My product is SongBox (https://songbox.rocks) - it's an alternative to things like bandcamp and soundcloud for creators who need to share audio files privately.…
2020
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Several years ago, I had a client whose salespeople were using Excel to generate sales proposals. This was inefficient and the resulting documents looked awful, so I developed a new process for them using a no-code platform. It featured a web form that was tied to a workflow engine, and a fancy PDF got emailed to the customer to sign. When the client loved the solution, I knew I was on to something. However, the no-code platform wasn't very customizable, so I decided to rebuild the process as a SaaS product. The client's CTO wanted in and we became cofounders. Today, we passed the…
2021
- 3IM
Hi all! Excited to share cc.dev after months of work and refinement. The idea for this product came from trying to do email marketing for my side project, CubeDesk, a site where Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can time themselves, race with one another, train algorithms — it's a fun niche! With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp. I knew AWS SES would be much cheaper, but it’s just an API with none of the other necessities you need for a robust email marketing platform. Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was…
2023 · cc.dev
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2019 · anonaddy.com
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Hey there, there are lot of disposable email services, but as I was thinking I realized 95% of the time, I don't care about my inbox. I just want to "verify my email". That's why I created a startup with no website, it's called [email protected], it's a credible domain (you don't say) and it will click on any "verify" links you send it to it. You can use aliases to get around of duplicate emails in the target system, so like [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] so choose an alias and start using the service! I will provide a…
2019
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2020 · github.com
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Spent the last month building Fertit - basically a newsletter manager but you bring your own SMTP and skip the DevOps nightmare. All the features (subscriber management, admin dashboard, custom preferences) without the infrastructure markup. The math that broke me: Mailchimp: $230/month for 15k contacts My solution: $10/month infrastructure + $10 SendGrid = unlimited What I learned: The "enterprise" features are mostly database operations with SMTP APIs. But the 3 weeks of Go/PostgreSQL/Redis setup explains why people just pay ConvertKit $300/month. Here's the thing:…
2025 · fertit.com
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One inbox. Endless aliases. Instant leak alerts.
May 2026 · emailalias.io
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- 14IM
Hey HN, I’m a solopreneur and have been in the SaaS space for the past 3 years. My last 3 startups failed, and a common challenge in all of them was figuring out how to reach my audience. Recently I started with cold outreach (its a struggle, since I dont have much experience with marketing). I am finding leads mainly using exa.ai websets (web vector search, extremelly good for multiple use cases, recommend checking them out) and then sending them through smartlead. I ran the campaign for the past 30 days and 12-15% emails always bounced. This wasted my email credits & chances of reaching…
2025 · verifyemailai.com
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Hey HN, I was tired of writing HTML emails and one day was going through reddit specifically searching for people who hated writing HTML emails and heard a lot of complaints from solopreneurs and marketers as this is a very boring task and many marketers and solo founders have much more important tasks to take care off. So I decided to build HTML email to solve this. My friends have already saved hours using this product. This is my 11th product and I think this solves a problem many folks are struggling with. Feel free to share your views.
2024 · html-email.com
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2021 · hanami.run
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2021 · locke.id
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Multi-domain email, transactional email API, and MCP agents.
25d ago · purpletoadmail.com
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- 20IB
Hi HN! I'm Louw, founder of the enterprise insurtech scale-up Root[0]. Over the last 8 years, my inbox has been flooded with unsolicited emails, especially since early 2023. Recruitment services, outsourced software development agencies, and a crazy amount of lead generation services (thanks, Apollo!) drowned my inbox. To solve this, I created Unspam. Initially, it was a simple tool for myself and fellow founders to reduce noise. And it worked — about 10% of my emails were swiftly and accurately categorized as unsolicited messages. Given its success, I've decided to package and share Unspam…
2024 · unspam.io
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Problem: I (accidentally) hoard domains :') 1. I get excited about a new project 2. I buy a domain 3. I get busy, and the domain collects a thick layer of dust I know I'm not alone in this, either So, I had the idea of creating a simple and casual marketplace for folks like me to list their domains at a fair price with a nice community feel to free up these caged domains It felt like a great project for me to pick up some new skills, so I got to it All up, it took me about a month, and I built the whole thing live on Twitch I've always sat on the design, marketing and front-end side of the…
2023 · dwarf.domains
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Researched openers that sound like you did your homework.
18d ago · pitchpilot-sparkle-page.lovable.app
- 23DD
I recently discovered Cloudflare Email Routing. It's a super sweet feature within Cloudflare for creating disposable emails. Basically, if you have a domain connected to Cloudflare - you can create email addresses like "[email protected]" that can forward emails to your primary inbox (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.). This is great since you'll never need to share your real email address when signing up for new online services again. It will help you keep your primary inbox free from spam and promotional junk! However, managing my disposable emails using Cloudflare's UI is not…
2023 · github.com
- 24TE
I'm the founder of AhaSend. We've built a transactional email service specifically for developers, with a Pay-As-You-Go pricing model ($0.50 per 1,000 emails) and up to 70% volume discount for platform partners. While there are many ESPs out there, we focused heavily on the Developer Experience to solve the pain of building and testing email flows: * The CLI: Heavily inspired by the Stripe CLI, we built a tool that lets you develop and debug locally. You can listen to webhooks, trigger events, manage your domains, and send / list / debug messages directly from your terminal. * True…
Dec 2025 · ahasend.com
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