What Loops gets right
Loops launched as the modern alternative to Mailchimp for SaaS companies. The product UI is clean and focused. The onboarding is fast. They unified transactional and marketing email under one roof when most competitors still treat them as separate products. Their event-based contact model maps naturally to how SaaS apps think about users.
If you are a non-technical founder or a small SaaS team that needs to send onboarding emails and newsletters without touching an API, Loops is easy to recommend.
The trouble is that modern apps need more than a polished frontend.
The integration gap
Loops does not support SMTP. That means any application or service that sends email over SMTP cannot use Loops without a code change. This is a real constraint, not a minor limitation.
SMTP is how most backend frameworks, legacy applications, WordPress installs, and off-the-shelf tools send email. Ruby on Rails uses Action Mailer with SMTP. Laravel uses Mail::send() with SMTP drivers. Older internal tools and third-party SaaS integrations do the same. If your stack includes any of these, Loops requires you to either rewrite those integrations or maintain a second email provider alongside it.
Transmit ships an SMTP relay endpoint that accepts standard SMTP connections and routes them through your Transmit account. No code changes for existing SMTP clients. You swap the host and credentials and you are done.
No inbound email means one-way communication
Loops sends email. It does not receive it.
For many use cases, that is fine. But if your app needs to receive replies, parse incoming messages, or route email to internal systems, you need inbound support. Common examples:
- Support ticket systems that create tickets from user replies
- Contract or approval flows that advance state when a user replies
- Webhook-based notifications triggered by incoming email
- Email forwarding for team inboxes
Transmit's inbound email routing handles all of these. You configure a receiving address on your verified domain, and Transmit parses incoming messages and either stores them, sends them to a webhook, forwards them to another address, or drops them. No extra infrastructure required.
Contact-based pricing scales poorly for developer use cases
Loops starts at $49/mo and pricing is based on contact count. As your user base grows, your email costs grow regardless of how much email you actually send.
For a SaaS app with 5,000 active users but low email volume (a weekly digest and occasional transactional messages), contact-based pricing means you are paying for contacts who may receive one email per month. That does not map well to actual infrastructure cost.
Transmit's managed mode is volume-based. You pay for what you send, not for how many contacts you store. Transactional managed starts at $2/mo for 3,000 emails. You can store contacts without them counting against a tier.
BYOK mode starts free (1,000 emails/month, no credit card) and paid tiers start at $9/mo. Again, volume-based, not contact-based.
Feature and pricing comparison
| Feature | Loops | Transmit Managed | Transmit BYOK |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $49/mo (contact-based) | $2/mo (volume-based) | Free (1k emails/mo) |
| Pricing model | Per contact | Per email (volume tiers) | Per email (AWS direct) |
| SMTP relay | No | Yes | Yes |
| Inbound email routing | No | Yes | Yes |
| Automated warmup | No | Yes | Yes |
| Sequences / drip | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Reputation isolation | Shared | Per-org | Your own AWS account |
| BYOK / own AWS | No | No | Yes |
| MCP server for AI | No | Yes | Yes |
| REST API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier | 1,000 contacts | No | 1,000 emails/mo |
Transmit also ships sequences
One thing Loops does well is automation. Their event-triggered sequences let you enroll contacts when they sign up, complete an action, or hit a lifecycle milestone.
Transmit ships sequences with the same model. Each sequence has steps with configurable delays (minutes, hours, days), per-step sender and template overrides, and two trigger types: list_add (auto-enroll when a contact is added to a list) or api (manual enrollment via API call). Sequences work in both managed and BYOK modes and are available on BYOK and Marketing plans.
The difference is that Transmit sequences sit alongside SMTP relay, inbound routing, warmup, and the full REST API. It is not a standalone marketing tool. It is one feature in a complete sending infrastructure.
When Loops is the right call
Loops is a reasonable choice if:
- Your app is fully API-driven and does not need SMTP support
- You do not need to receive or parse incoming email
- Your team wants a polished, opinionated UI over raw API access
- You are not on AWS and do not want to be
Loops is the wrong call if you need SMTP for any part of your stack, if your app handles replies, or if contact-based pricing is going to hurt at scale.
Getting started with Transmit
Create a free account. Managed mode handles all AWS infrastructure with no setup required. BYOK mode connects to your existing AWS credentials and gives you full control over sending infrastructure.
SMTP credentials are available from the dashboard immediately after connecting a domain. Your existing SMTP clients need only a host and credential change.
For more on how the two sending modes compare, see Managed vs BYOK.