pinebrook.dev
Fintech · Payments · 42 employees · Berlin
Three vendors, one bill.
Pinebrook consolidated transactional, marketing, and inbound parsing onto VoltMail. Receipt latency dropped 62%, and one engineer maintains the integration instead of three.
Vendors retired
3 → 1
consolidation
Webhook events
0 lost
in 8 months
Receipt latency
−62%
p95 send time
Engineer hours
−18 hrs/wk
maintenance
“We were paying for SendGrid, Postmark, and a Mailgun inbound parsing add-on. VoltMail did all three. The migration paid for itself before the second invoice landed.
EVElena Vasquez
CTO · Pinebrook
// the problem
A different vendor for every email shape.
Pinebrook split sending across three vendors: SendGrid for marketing, Postmark for transactional receipts, and Mailgun for inbound reply parsing on their support inbox. Each had its own SDK, its own webhook contract, its own suppression list, its own bill.
- Three SDKs, three webhook signing schemes, three on-call runbooks.
- Suppression lists out of sync — bounced contacts kept getting marketing campaigns.
- Inbound parsing failures were silent; engineers learned about them from angry customers.
// how voltmail fit
One API for sending, one for inbound, one suppression list.
Idempotency keys made the marketing campaign migration safe — they replayed every job with the same key for 24 hours during the cutover. Inbound parsing landed structured JSON on a single endpoint, and the global suppression list now blocks marketing sends to addresses that bounced on receipts.
- Idempotency keys made campaign retries safe during cutover.
- Inbound parsing → structured JSON on a single webhook endpoint.
- Single suppression list shared across receipts + marketing.
// eight months later
Receipts hit the inbox 62% faster.
p95 receipt-send latency went from 2.1s (SendGrid via their queue) to 800ms direct. The webhook replay tool has been used three times to recover from downstream outages — zero events lost in eight months. Elena reassigned the two engineers who used to babysit vendor integrations to actual product work.
- p95 receipt latency: 2,100ms → 800ms.
- Webhook replay used 3 times, zero events lost.
- $8k/mo total bill (was $11k across three vendors).
“Three vendors, one bill, two engineers freed up. The replay tool alone is worth the price.
EVElena Vasquez
CTO · Pinebrook