Loops

Loops — Lifecycle and marketing email for SaaS, priced on contacts rather than sends. Loops is built for the email a product sends around its users rather than to them one at a time: onboarding sequences, announcements and lifecycle campaigns, with a transactional API attached. The editor is deliberately opinionated and setup is fast. Billing on contacts rather than volume makes it cheap for frequent sends to a stable audience and expensive for a large dormant list. Founded 2022. Seed.

We track it in 1 comparison — Email APIs — so every claim below is a cell in a table you can open and check rather than an impression. Across those rosters it sits against 12 other tools, and what follows is where it visibly separates from them.

Where it wins.

• Time to first send — 15 min, 2nd of 13.
• llms.txt docs — Yes, which only 3 of 12 tools here manage.

Each of those is ranked against the whole roster on its category page, not against a hand-picked subset, so a first place here means first of everything we list.

Where it gives ground.

• React Email / MJML — , 10th of 12. Resend records react-email, mjml.
• IP warmup — No. Postmark records Yes.
• Inbound parsing — No. Postmark records Yes.
• Multi-domain sending — No. Resend records Yes.

None of these disqualify it on their own. They are the fields to check against your own requirements before you commit, because they are the ones where a competitor genuinely does better.

Provenance. 18 of 25 tracked fields carry a value for Loops, and 0 of those cite a document you can open. Nothing here carries a verification date yet, which is itself a reason to check before committing. Every figure keeps its own provenance — measured by us, claimed by the vendor, inferred, or community-reported — and we would rather print a dash than a guess.

Its nearest neighbour in our data is AhaSend. Loops is ahead on Hosted templates (visual-editor against none) and Product scope (marketing-first against transactional-only). AhaSend takes Multi-domain sending (Yes against No) and Pricing model (pay-as-you-go against contact-based). That pattern repeats across the rest of the roster — see Loops alternatives for the other rivals, each compared the same way.

Founded

2022

Funding

Seed

Fields we track

18 of 25

The best-looking way to send lifecycle email, and the wrong tool for high-volume transactional. Contact-based pricing is a bet that your list stays engaged; if you accumulate dormant signups, the bill grows for mail you never send.

Time to first send

15 min2nd of 13

Inferred

React Email / MJML

–10th of 12

Inferred

IP warmup

○No9th of 11

Inferred

Inbound parsing

○No9th of 12

Inferred

Multi-domain sending

○No12th of 12

Inferred

Pricing model

contact-based13th of 13

Inferred

llms.txt docs

●Yes1st of 12

Inferred

Data residency

us9th of 12

Inferred

Loops is the right call in these situations, each one drawn from a field we actually record:

• Onboarding sequences and product announcements.
• Small teams with no dedicated email engineer.
• Products where marketing and transactional should share one contact record.
• Time to first send is your binding constraint. Loops records 15 min, 2nd of 13 in the Email APIs roster. We define that field as wall-clock from starting signup on a clean account to a message delivered to a Gmail inbox that is NOT a verified address on the account.
• llms.txt docs is your binding constraint. Loops records Yes, which only 3 of the 12 tools in the Email APIs roster do. We define that field as are the docs published in a form an agent can consume directly — an llms.txt index or markdown twins of every page? partial = raw markdown exists publicly but there is no index.

Reach for something else when any of the following is a requirement rather than a nice-to-have:

• React Email / MJML. Loops records , 10th of 12 in the Email APIs roster. Resend records react-email, mjml on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• IP warmup. Loops records No on the Email APIs table. Postmark records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Inbound parsing. Loops records No on the Email APIs table. Postmark records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Multi-domain sending. Loops records No on the Email APIs table. Resend records Yes on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.
• Pricing model. Loops records contact-based, the weakest of the 13 tools in the Email APIs roster. Amazon SES records pay-as-you-go on the same field. If that is a hard requirement rather than a preference, start elsewhere.

We publish this block because a comparison that only lists what a tool is good at is marketing. Every figure above sits on the same page as its source, and the field definitions are on the category tables if you want to check how we measured them.

What we don't know. 7 of the 25 fields we track for Loops are still blank: Log retention, Throughput ceiling, BIMI, Price / 1k emails, Free tier, Dedicated IP and MCP server. Those render as dashes rather than as zeroes or assumptions, because an empty cell and a bad cell are not the same thing and only one of them is honest. If you know any of these figures and can point at a document, tell us.