Wanted to share my AcelleMail SaaS journey!
The Platform
SendStack (name changed for privacy) — an email marketing platform targeting small businesses in India and Southeast Asia.
Tech Stack
- AcelleMail Extended License (purchased 2018)
- 3x DigitalOcean droplets (load balanced)
- Amazon SES for sending (Mumbai region)
- Redis cluster for queues
- MySQL 8 (managed database)
- Cloudflare for CDN + DDoS protection
Numbers
- 200 paying clients
- 2.5M total subscribers across all clients
- 15M emails/month average
- 99.7% uptime over last 12 months
- $6,200/month revenue
- $800/month infrastructure cost
Plans & Pricing
| Plan | Subscribers | Price/month |
|------|-------------|-------------|
| Starter | Up to 2,500 | $9 |
| Growth | Up to 10,000 | $25 |
| Pro | Up to 50,000 | $49 |
| Enterprise | Unlimited | $99 |
Screenshots
(Sharing redacted screenshots showing the dashboard, campaign builder, and analytics)
Lessons Learned
- Start with a free tier — converts well to paid
- Invest in onboarding — recorded video tutorials reduce support tickets by 60%
- Localize — we support English, Hindi, Tamil, and Indonesian
- Focus on deliverability — it's the #1 reason customers stay or leave
- Community matters — we have a WhatsApp group for power users
All of this started with a $590 Extended License purchase. Best business decision ever.
