So here I was, in Nov 2023, trying to find a tool to schedule email reminders to go out, over and over again. For the past 7 years I had been using a tool I built for that purpose… but I couldn’t continue… I just couldn’t. The interface was dated… the payment provider blocked us for having no revenue… making any updates to the code was impossible because it was using old versions of software. It was time to accept ScheduleThatEmail was dead and move over to a different SaaS, that would help me send recurring emails.
So I went to Google and searched. And searched. And searched. And to my surprise… there wasn’t any good option for me. All of the tools that send recurring emails were either unsafe, unreliable, old or straight out discontinued. And no… to my surprise… no email client had implemented the “recurring email” feature, that I’ve been asking for the past 7 years.
Building a software that sends email reminders
So what did I do? I embraced my developer bias… and spent a few weeks to built a tool to send email reminders, from scratch. My goal – create an app that is easy to use, easy to maintain, easy to update. If I find more people who would like to use this app, great! If not… I keep using it, for myself, until Gmail, Apple or Outlook provide this functionality baked-in.
During the process… I’ve discovered a lot of what I needed to build this… wasn’t to my liking as well, in the Laravel ecosystem… so it kicked off building something to solve that need as well.
Launching and finding users
Fast-forward to July 2024… and the app is built… recurrr.com helps send email reminders in GMail and of course it helps send recurring emails in Outlook too. In fact… it can send email reminders no matter your email provider – FastMail, Yahoo, custom cPanel etc… All email providers use SMTP to send emails… and so does recurrr.com. You just plug in your SMTP credentials, and recurrr.com can send daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly reminders on your behalf, without you lifting a finger. We’re early stage, so you might not find it when you google it (we’re working on it), but the app is fully functional, and I’ve moved over everybody who was using ScheduleThatEmail. I’m using it myself, and even with the barebones functionality it has right now, I’m loving it.
I’m writing this article for those who were using tools to send reminder emails in the past… and they got discontinued… yes, you have a solution again. Try recurrr.com, it’s free for the time being (no credit card required), stable and useful. If you do, please let me know what you think… I’d really really like to improve it to fit other people’s needs too, not just my own.
PS. Why change the name from ScheduleThatEmail to Recurrr? Because emails are just the first step. I personally also need it to send Discord messages and Slack messages… so those are the first new channels to be added. In fact, it’s one of the things I’ve learned from building ScheduleThatEmail 7 years ago… it was a bad idea to only support Gmail. Right after I launched ScheduleThatEmail, Gmail changed its policy, and required a $25.000 security audit to use the Gmail API. For an early-stage bootstrapped SaaS… that was a death sentence. So this time… recurrr.com avoids the gatekeepers… and uses SMTP credentials. But… that may be a story for another time.