Legal
Sending Policy
The rules for sending email and SMS from a startbuddi workspace, the limits on each plan, and what happens when a workspace goes past them.
Who this applies to
This policy applies to every message sent from a startbuddi workspace: campaigns, automations, one-to-one email, invoices, booking confirmations, document shares, and test sends. It applies to trials and paid plans alike, and it forms part of the Terms of Service.
Permission
You may only send to people who have a relationship with your business and have not opted out. That means contacts who signed up, enquired, booked, bought, or otherwise asked to hear from you.
You may not send to:
- Purchased, rented, scraped, or harvested lists.
- Addresses collected for a different business or a different purpose.
- Anyone who has unsubscribed, marked your mail as spam, or asked you to stop.
Every marketing message carries a working unsubscribe link and your business name and mailing address. These are added automatically and may not be removed or obscured.
Where your email sends from
Before your first campaign you confirm where it sends from. There are two ways to do that, and you need one of them.
Verify your own domain.You add DNS records once and your campaigns go out as your own address, on your own sending reputation, at your plan’s full allowance. This is the option worth taking.
Or confirm a single address. If you only have a Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook address, we send on your behalf. Your business name still appears as the sender, replies still come back to your address, but the technical sender is a startbuddi address, and sending is capped at 1,000 emails a month and 200 a day whatever your plan says.
The reason is not a preference. Since Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft began enforcing sender authentication on bulk mail, an email sent from a free mailbox address through any platform fails those checks and is quarantined or refused. Nobody can fix that for you, because nobody but the mailbox provider owns that domain. Sending on our behalf keeps your mail deliverable; it is a stopgap, not a destination.
The lower cap on the shared address is there because every workspace using it shares one sending reputation. One list collected badly affects everyone on it, so that traffic is kept small.
Transactional messages such as invoices, receipts and booking confirmations always send, from the startbuddi address if you have not set up a domain, so billing and scheduling keep working.
Limits
Every plan has a monthly allowance and a daily ceiling. The daily ceiling exists because a month of sending compressed into an afternoon damages deliverability for everyone, including you.
| Plan | Emails per month | Emails per day | Pay as you go |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trial | 500 | 100 | Not available |
| Core (legacy) | 1,000 | 500 | Optional |
| Starter | 5,000 | 1,000 | Optional |
| Growth | 25,000 | 5,000 | Optional |
| Scale | 100,000 | 20,000 | Optional |
These are the allowances when you send from your own verified domain. On the shared startbuddi address the ceiling is 1,000 a month and 200 a day, whichever plan you are on.
Test sends are for previewing your own work. They may only be addressed to someone on your own team, and are capped at 20 a day.
What happens at the limit
- At 80 and 90 percent of your monthly allowance we email the workspace owner so there are no surprises.
- At 100 percent on a trial or free plan sending pauses. We will never charge a card on a trial without you choosing to upgrade first.
- At 100 percent on a paid plan you choose in advance: pause sending, or turn on pay as you go and keep sending. Pay as you go bills in blocks of 1,000 emails, added to your next invoice.
- The daily ceiling cannot be lifted by paying. It resets the next day.
A campaign that runs into a limit is paused rather than half sent. You keep the audience and can resume it once you have allowance again.
Bounces and complaints
High bounce or spam complaint rates are the clearest sign that a list was not collected with permission, and they damage delivery for every workspace on the platform. We monitor both. Sustained rates above industry norms will pause sending on the workspace while we look into it.
Suspension
We may pause sending on a workspace, with or without notice, where we see:
- Sending to addresses that are not contacts of that workspace.
- Volume that does not match the plan, the account, or the size of the contact list.
- Use of any part of the product as a relay for mail unrelated to that business.
- Content that is deceptive, impersonates another business, or breaks applicable law.
Where sending is paused, your data is not deleted. Write to us and we will tell you what we saw and what is needed to restore sending.
Questions
Email hello@startbuddi.com and we will come back to you.