bulaev.ai

Brevo

CCCFreemium

Publishing · GTM & content

Email and SMS marketing, transactional email and a CRM in one account, with a free plan.

Open brevo.com

What it is

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is an email and SMS marketing platform that also handles transactional email (password resets, receipts, magic links) and a light CRM. For a small company that means one vendor for the waitlist form, the weekly digest and the system emails, with a shared contact list and shared unsubscribe state. The API and SMTP relay are the parts an agent-run stack touches: a Worker calls the contacts endpoint to add a lead, a cron job triggers a campaign, a webhook reports bounces back.

Brevo has a free plan with a daily send limit and paid plans priced by email volume rather than by contact count; check the pricing page for current limits, which change.

Where it fits in the AI OS

GTM & content, the email layer under the content pipeline. Social posts create attention; the waitlist and the digest turn attention into a list you can reach without an algorithm. Because Brevo separates marketing from transactional sending, it also covers the "system email" step of the product itself.

Insider notes

members

How Serge's stack uses it

The live bulaev.ai landing page's "Join Waitlist" form writes into a Brevo list. That waitlist is the seed for the membership's first Free members. One lesson from the project's own notes: an earlier version of the site had the Brevo API key hardcoded in a route file; the rule now is secrets only in Wrangler secrets or .env, never in source, and the key is scheduled for rotation.

Setup in 5 minutes

  1. Create an account, verify your sending domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC records in Cloudflare DNS) before anything else.
  2. Create one list, "Waitlist", and one double-opt-in template.
  3. Create an API key with contacts and transactional scopes only; store it as a Wrangler secret.
  4. From a Worker, POST /v3/contacts with the email and listIds; test with your own address.
  5. Set up the bounce/unsubscribe webhook so your database stays in sync.

Alternatives

  • Resend — developer-first transactional email with a clean API; no marketing campaigns UI.
  • Mailchimp — the incumbent for campaigns; pricier at scale.
  • Loops / Customer.io — product-led lifecycle email.
  • Postmark — transactional only, excellent deliverability.