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Why Won't Resend Outsource Its Keys?

Zeno Rocha considered WorkOS and skipped it because the team has to own that part. Permissioning and roles could still come from an outside tool, and the problem is still unsolved.

A friend is building an API platform where people can provision API keys. Resend sells API keys to make money, so that work stays inside the company. Handing it to someone else adds another round trip and is going to make access slower. Opening the site in New Zealand might not perform as well as opening it somewhere else. Building a completely new permissioning model makes no sense either. Resend is not here for a new model, but the result has to stay extremely easy.

Someone trying to set up email on a Sunday afternoon, while kids are running, has only 10 or 20 minutes. Get the setup wrong in the 10 or 20 minutes and the person leaves, never comes back, and there is no second chance.

Grokipedia·Resend·New Zealand

Transcript

Building what's next (Interview) ·

The Changelog: Software Dev & Open Source

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  1. How Did Resend Take Its First Payments?Zeno Rocha took Resend's first payments with a Stripe payment link in January 2023.
  2. Why Not Let OpenClaw Write the Email Tool?Zeno Rocha refused to let OpenClaw write the email command line because giving it an open API spec would generate a badly written command line, and he hated…
  3. How Can a Mail Record Silently Stop Company Email?Zeno Rocha says receiving email is tricky because an MX record can compete with Google Workspace on priority. Setup starts by adding an MX record.
  4. What Email Feature Was Requested Most for a Year?Zeno Rocha built the first version of inbound email by feeling the pain himself, after it stayed the number one most requested feature for over a year.
  5. How Does TripSee Capture a Booking Email?Zeno Rocha says one company they help, TripSee, lets a user forward a flight or hotel booking email to a special address.
  6. What Kind of Company Is Resend?Zeno Rocha says Resend is a utility company. The team started out thinking they were building a developer tools company.
  7. Why Do Agents Auto-retry Standard Rate Limits?Zeno Rocha says agents know how to auto-retry when a service follows the rate-limiting RFC.
  8. How Does Zeno Rocha Hire for Email?Zeno Rocha is hiring through heavy noise from fake resumes and other weird things, trying to assemble the Avengers of the email industry.

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