How Raycast Modernized their Email Sending
Raycast shares their real-world story of migrating to Resend, highlighting a smoother DX, clean UI, and newfound confidence in email sending.
If you’ve spent time in developer circles lately, chances are you’ve heard of Raycast.
The popular productivity tool lets you control your Mac (and soon Windows) with lightning speed, run scripts, search apps, and even build your own native extensions with TypeScript and React.
Pedro Duarte, a designer and engineer at Raycast, is the public voice for Raycast as a key member of the Hype Team. As a careful curator of user experience at Raycast, Pedro especially felt the pain of email sending.
Finding an email partner
We opened a Slack channel with Raycast early on to help them with all things email. Long before they started using Resend, we provided key industry knowledge to fix spam issues they were facing with another provider.
Choosing an email vendor isn't like most SaaS relationships. Email is a complex and legacy industry that is also constantly evolving to keep up with spammers, phishers, and other bad actors.
This means even if you follow every best practice, you'll still need help if you begin to face deliverability issues. An email service provider is a partner that should both guide you to best practices while also maintaining reliable infrastructure and quick support.
Legacy system friction
Working with their previous provider felt cumbersome and nerve-wracking, especially for broadcasts to large audiences. The interface was complicated, the developer workflow involved too many steps, and every send carried that lingering fear: Is something going to break?
As Pedro put it, "Nobody was getting the kind of confidence you need when you're writing an email for so many people."
Raycast started looking for a modern alternative that felt more aligned with how they build software: clean, fast, and developer-friendly.
A quick test: Transactional emails
Raycast decided to give Resend a try for transactional emails during an offsite in Italy. They picked a small project: waitlist emails for Raycast’s iOS and Windows apps.
We were sitting in the lobby of our hotel and were worried that this would be a long and cumbersome project, which would mean missing out on the super nice Italian weather.
But within 30 minutes, we were done.
It was an early taste of how different a modern developer experience could be with Resend.
Expanding to marketing tests
After gaining confidence with transactional emails, the team decided to try marketing emails for their investor updates as a test.
Current workflow walkthrough
Following these initial tests, we had the in-person opportunity to walk through their current workflow with Pedro. He detailed their legacy process for building marketing emails and identified key friction points Resend could solve.
Like many senders, Raycast was concerned about the deliverability impacts of switching providers. We guided them as they tested a smaller newsletter while we worked together to ensure their deliverability stayed strong.
What started as a quick experiment quickly grew into a full migration for Raycast.
Today, Resend handles all their iOS and Windows invite emails, waitlist communications, and targeted broadcasts.
True Developer Experience
For Pedro and the team the biggest difference Resend brought was confidence, and that confidence boiled down to two things: a clean, intuitive user interface and crystal-clear documentation.
We even helped craft custom email templates for Raycast using react.email.
Resend simplicity means sending emails no longer brings stress. Instead, it’s a straightforward, almost effortless process that anyone on the team can navigate without fear. Product owners and engineering managers can now spin up email broadcasts on their own.
For a fast-moving company like Raycast, that’s priceless. It means developers can stay focused on shipping product features while the broader team handles communication.
Why migrate to Resend?
Raycast’s story echoes what many developer teams are discovering: modern tools should reduce complexity, not add to it.
When it comes to email, choosing a modern platform can transform the experience from stressful and time-consuming to something anyone on the team can handle.
It's nice to see Resend approaching something that is supposed to be simple… in a simple way. I feel like the biggest improvement is the confidence that your email is being sent the right way.
For Raycast, migrating wasn’t just about swapping providers. It was about building a faster, cleaner workflow that matched the way they build everything else.
And in the world of fast-moving developer tools, that makes all the difference.