Priced out of testing email
2026-08-07
This started while I was building isthisascam.email, a service my parents can forward a suspicious message to and get a plain answer: scam or not. My dad gets the scam texts and voicemails. My mom gets the emails. I couldn't be there every time it happened, so I built something that could. The whole product is email.
Testing it was the problem. You can't mock your way through an email product; I needed real mailboxes, real sends, and assertions on exactly what landed. The established tool for the job is Mailosaur, and it's a good one. Then I ran the numbers. They were perfectly reasonable for a QA team with a budget. I was a team of one, pre-revenue, funding everything out of my own pocket.
So I did what any sensible business does. I rationed. I ran the email suite less often, tested the happy path, and told myself the edge cases could wait. A busy afternoon of CI could burn the whole days allowance, so some days I just skipped it. Take a step back and that picture is ridiculous: I was taking calculated risks on the one part of my product that WAS the product.
At some point this stopped feeling like a budgeting problem and started feeling like a gap in the market. The harness I kept wishing for - test traffic nobody meters, a fresh mailbox for every run, keys minted from code, an agent that does its own wiring - didn't exist at a price one person could carry. After a bit of noodling, I decided to build it.
fixture.email is that harness. One plan, with everything needed to test email in it. Mint as many mailboxes as your tests want, send to them, read them back, and none of it touches an allowance. The ONLY thing metered is delivery to real recipients outside your test domain. The API gives you deterministic ground truth about what arrived (headers, links, authentication results), and an AI agent can drive all of it: point your coding agent at the MCP and it wires up the mint → send → assert loop itself.
If you've ever cut a test suite down to fit an email-testing bill, this one's for you. Point your LLM at the docs and check it out. Pricing is straightforward: one plan that scales with units for external mail.