Ask HN: Why Don't Google and Microsoft Offer an Alternative to Amazon SES?

4 points by ohans 1 year ago | 5 comments

Hey HN,

I’ve been thinking about this a lot: why do Google and Microsoft, with their vast resources and expertise in cloud infrastructure, still have no true alternative to Amazon SES?

Building scalable, reliable email infrastructure is no small feat—I'm well aware. But does that fully explain the absence? Postmark was built by a small team back in 2009, proving that it can be done, even without a tech giant’s backing. So why the radio silence from Google and Microsoft on this front?

Is there a technical barrier I’m missing, or could it be something else altogether?

Would love to hear your thoughts / ideas

gregjor 1 year ago |

Both Google and Microsoft have built "scalable, reliable email infrastructure," GMail and Exchange/Outlook respectively.

Both offer outbound bulk emailing. Google supports that through the GMail API, and Microsoft has both the Exchange-based email system and Azure Communication Services. Google partners with Sendgrid as well for customers who need that kind of solution.

I don't know what you mean by "true alternative to Amazon SES." What counts as a true alternative depends on requirements. Large-scale outbound emailing seems like a niche business with low margins and high frustration (criminal scammers, blocked IP ranges).

I could ask why Amazon doesn't offer a true alternative to GMail and Outlook. Different business models probably explain it. Amazon AWS makes money by renting out resources. Google and Microsoft make money doing that too, but they rely more on data collection, advertising, and in Microsoft's case CRM systems that include bulk emailing.

ohans 1 year ago | |

You make some solid points!

> I don't know what you mean by "true alternative to Amazon SES.

e.g., the GMail API is restrictive (https://support.google.com/a/answer/166852?hl=en) for bulk sends. That's not the intended use case.

> Google partners with Sendgrid as well for customers who need that kind of solution.

Do you mean via the marketplace integration?

> I could ask why Amazon doesn't offer a true alternative to GMail and Outlook.

That's fair. I reckon different models like you mentioned

gregjor 1 year ago | | |

AWS has quotas and limits too, just different than Google's and Microsoft's.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/quotas.html

As usual with AWS, trying to translate their quotas into a dollar amount you will spend takes some work. AWS also throttles API requests, like Google and Microsoft.

I have pushed my customers to SendGrid when they need bulk outgoing email capabilities, and a reasonably easy way to manage bounces and unsubscribes. Twilio owns SendGrid. Their main competitor, MailChimp, got bought by Intuit a while back.

I don't know the details but one customer hosting on GCP uses SendGrid and told me they got better pricing because of the Google partnership. I don't know how that works exactly, just that Google mentions it. GCP doesn't allow bulk emailing from their cloud infrastructure but does allow you to use GMail, or of course through SendGrid.

Most of my customers use a CRM -- Hubspot, Salesforce, etc. -- to manage the whole customer relationship process, which includes inbound and outbound email. You can plug those into SendGrid or Mailchimp if those give you a better set of features or price.

SavageBeast 1 year ago |

Perhaps theres no money in it and the market need is well served today by existing companies?

ohans 1 year ago | |

That's certainly a possibility! However, with 300 billion emails sent a day and assuming 10% of those are transactional / marketing, I assume there's a play for a pay-as-you-go solution. SES holds a monopoly in that space now.