Drew: Hey. So here's a question I've gotten. Can I just replace my email program with
Drew: AI? For cheaper?
Drew: The answer is yes... But that word "cheaper" is doing a lot of work in that
Drew: question. Because what you save in dollars, you sort of pick up in other
Drew: ways.
Drew: This is "AI, Honestly."... I'm Drew. I take real AI-related questions from
Drew: founders and business owners... and tell you what's real, what's not, and what it
Drew: would take to build. No HYPE. No DOOM.
Drew:
Drew: So whoever's asking this... it's somebody with an email list. They send marketing
Drew: emails, maybe some announcements now and then. It's not the core of the business
Drew: or anything. But every month there's this bill. And some of these email programs
Drew: get really expensive, especially as your list grows.
Drew: And I think that's the part that bugs people. Because of how a lot of these
Drew: services price you. They charge you more as your list gets bigger. So you're sort
Drew: of paying rent to store email addresses. The more successful you get, the more
Drew: people you've collected... the more you pay. To store them. It's a spreadsheet of
Drew: emails, more or less, and the bill keeps climbing.
Drew: So yeah, I get the question. You look at that bill, you look at what AI can do
Drew: now, and you go, wait. Why am I paying this?
Drew: Yes. You can replace it. But the real answer kind of splits into three
Drew: versions.
Drew: So... version one is the basics. Sending emails to your list, handling
Drew: unsubscribes, basic templates. All of that is very doable with AI. Pretty
Drew: easily, even. And that's where most people are gonna save the most money, so
Drew: that's the good spot to be in.
Drew: Version two is the bonus stuff. Stuff that's actually more capable than your
Drew: off-the-shelf program. Custom logic that's specific to how your business
Drew: works. I've got an example of that one, 'cause it's kind of the fun part, so hold
Drew: onto that.
Drew: And then version three is the top end. If you've got somebody designing fancy
Drew: custom templates in a drag-and-drop visual editor, with automation wired into
Drew: Shopify and a couple other systems... that's where I'd kind of say, eh, maybe
Drew: don't. And it's not that AI can't do it. It's that rebuilding all of that yourself
Drew: would be a huge job, and the program you're already paying for just does it.
Drew: At that end, the math kind of flips on you.
Drew: But most of you listening, you're in version one or two. So... that's the good
Drew: news.
Drew: Now, here's the one thing you can't really get around. You do have to pay
Drew: something. Because you need a reputable sender. You need to be sending from
Drew: somewhere that follows the spam laws, where the sender's verified, so your
Drew: emails actually land in the inbox and don't just go straight to spam.
Drew: And that, right there, is what these email programs are really selling you.
Drew: Take away the templates and the list management and the dashboards and all
Drew: that... and the thing of real value is delivery. The fact that your email shows
Drew: up where it's supposed to. That reliability. That's the actual product.
Drew: So you still need that piece. And here's where you get it cheap.
Drew: The tool is called Re-send. It's a sending service, and it handles exactly
Drew: that piece. The reliable, verified, won't-get-dumped-in-spam delivery.
Drew: The free tier gets you up to 100 emails a day, or 3,000 a month. So if you're just
Drew: testing an idea, getting something off the ground, free works for a while.
Drew: Once you grow past that, the first paid tier is twenty bucks a month. And that
Drew: gets you a lot. It takes the daily cap off entirely. So whatever your email bill
Drew: is right now, kind of picture it as twenty dollars. That's the move.
Drew: Now here's the trick. The reason this ends up so cheap. You don't store your
Drew: list in Re-send. Storing the list is the thing that runs up the bill on those
Drew: other services, right, that's the whole rent thing I mentioned. So instead, you
Drew: store your emails in a database you control. In my case I often use Supabase.
Drew: And this is the part that makes it close to free. If you're already running a
Drew: website or a product on Supabase, or any database, you just add a table. You're
Drew: site is already running on Supabase, so you add a table for the email signups,
Drew: one for sending logs, and... that's kind of it. Storage is basically free 'cause
Drew: you're reusing what you've already got.
Drew: So then the system itself. An agentic system that gets run through command line
Drew: prompts, or eventually a UI. There's a folder with your email templates in it,
Drew: written in markdown. You run a command, an agent grabs a template, checks your
Drew: list in the database, and sends it out through Re-send.
Drew: And unsubscribes, you build those right in. In my setup it's a Supabase edge
Drew: function. Every email goes out with an unsubscribe link in the footer. Somebody
Drew: clicks it, it updates a table that marks them unsubscribed, and the next time you
Drew: send, it just skips them. It's pretty easy. The AI walks you through making
Drew: sure that part's done right.
Drew: Okay, so now the bonus layer. The fun part. Version two.
Drew: I had a site with purchases on it. Separate system, but it shared the same
Drew: database. And we wanted to send a custom-but-templated thank-you email
Drew: whenever somebody bought something. But only their first time. So we set the
Drew: agent up to scan the purchases table, craft the message based on recipient, and
Drew: every time it sent a thank-you, it logged it to a separate "sent" table. So the
Drew: next time, it could check. Has this person already gotten this one? No? Send
Drew: it. Yes? Skip it.
Drew: And that was built on top of the email system, because it existed and I
Drew: controlled it fully.
Drew: And that's the thing. Once you own the whole system, you can do stuff like that.
Drew: Stuff that's custom to your business. In some ways it's more flexible than the
Drew: out-of-the-box product, 'cause you're not stuck inside whatever their software lets
Drew: you do.
Drew: Now, one more piece. Because everything I just described runs from a command line.
Drew: You're editing a file, running a command. And for most business owners, that's...
Drew: yeah, that's not gonna work day to day.
Drew: So you put a light little interface on top. And this part's simple. It's just a
Drew: skin over the thing. A box to type your email, a button to send. You hit the
Drew: button, it runs the command behind the scenes. Stick it on a domain, hand it to
Drew: your team, and now anybody can use it. Nobody's touching a terminal.
Drew: And look, even if none of that command-line stuff landed for you just
Drew: now, that's fine. I just wanted you to hear what's under the hood. But you can
Drew: hire somebody to set this up without too much trouble. You don't need an email
Drew: expert who knows everything. You just need somebody who can hook up Re-send and
Drew: then listen to the AI when it tells them, hey, you gotta add an unsubscribe link.
Drew: You listen, you add it. That's the job.
Drew: So here's what that pitch leaves out.
Drew: First one. You're building this. Which means you own the edge cases now. When
Drew: something breaks — a send fails, an unsubscribe doesn't fire — there's no
Drew: support line to call. It's you, or whoever you hired. With the expensive
Drew: program, that headache was kind of baked into what you were paying for.
Drew: Second. The top-end stuff I mentioned. If you've got advanced automations wired
Drew: into Shopify and a bunch of other systems, you'd have to rebuild every one
Drew: of those in AI. It's possible. If you're a big enough business with custom enough
Drew: workflows, you can absolutely automate that part too. But possible and worth-it
Drew: are not the same thing. So be honest with yourself about how much you're really
Drew: signing up to rebuild.
Drew: And third, deliverability is the whole game here. You'll still always want to
Drew: pay for that, but that's the one thing we're still paying for... Re-send or
Drew: someone else.
Drew: So... can AI save you money on your email sending? Yeah. Real money, especially as
Drew: your list gets big. It's not free. Figure twenty bucks a month most likely, maybe
Drew: free if you're small. And it's gonna pretty much always beat what those
Drew: third-party providers charge you.
Drew: It really just comes down to which version you want. The basics? Easy win,
Drew: go do it. The custom bonus stuff? Even better, and sometimes hard to buy off a
Drew: shelf. The full enterprise automation rebuild? ... yeah, maybe leave that one
Drew: alone for now.
Drew: That's it for this episode.