KoltrixCustom-domain email for indie SaaS
One to three people shipping a product need mail on their own domain, a way for the app to send, and somewhere replies land. What it costs and how to set it up.
On this page(4 sections)
The email setup for a small SaaS ends up the same way almost every time. You start with a personal Gmail. You add Workspace when you need [email protected]. You add a transactional API when the app has to send a password reset. You add a newsletter tool when you want to tell people what you shipped. Three vendors, three bills, three sets of DNS records, and no two of them know anything about each other.
What you actually need
- A mailbox on your own domain that you and your co-founder can both read, plus shared addresses like
support@andhello@. - A way for the application to send — an HTTP API or SMTP, with delivery webhooks so you know what happened.
- Somewhere replies can land. This is the one everybody skips, and then discovers a year later that customers have been replying to
noreply@the whole time. - Deliverability that is somebody's job. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce suppression and complaint handling.
Note what is not on that list: a campaign builder, an audience segmentation engine, landing pages, or a CRM. Those are real products for real problems, but they are not the problem you have in year one.
The setup, start to finish
- Add your domain. You get an SPF record, a DKIM record and a DMARC record to publish, plus MX records when you are ready to receive.
- Publish the records at your registrar. Verification is usually minutes, occasionally an hour.
- Create your addresses. One for you, one for each person, and the shared ones.
- Send a test message and check it lands in an inbox, not a spam folder.
- Point the app at the API, or at SMTP if it already speaks SMTP.
- Switch MX over when you are ready for mail to arrive. This is the only irreversible-feeling step, and it is the one to do on a quiet morning.
If you are moving from Google Workspace, the cut-over has a specific order — there is a checklist for it.
Where agents actually help
A two-person team does not need AI to write its email. It needs AI to stop reading email it did not want. The two jobs that pay for themselves are screening cold outreach — a founder with a public address gets a startling amount of it — and remembering what was promised, in both directions, without a spreadsheet.
Anything beyond that should be a proposal you approve rather than an action taken for you. We do not let agents send.
The honest limits
If you need Docs, Sheets, Calendar and Meet, you need Workspace, and Koltrix is not a replacement for it. If your team lives in Apple Mail or Outlook, we have no IMAP access yet. If your enterprise customer's security questionnaire requires SOC 2, we do not have it. Those are the three reasons a small team should not move to us yet, and it is better to say so here than to find out during onboarding.
Start with Koltrix
Your domain, one inbox, and an API that sends.
A team inbox where AI sorts and drafts (nothing is sent without your click), plus the transactional API and SMTP relay your product sends with. 7 days free, no card.
