Pick a mailbox tier before you pay for one

You are two people booking demos with operations managers in named countries, so the question is how many mailboxes you can keep warm and answer. LocalSMTP gives you standard SMTP and IMAP mailboxes with browser webmail, which means either of you can reply from a phone or a shared laptop without installing a client.

Because the tiers are lifetime and counted by mailbox, the decision is a counting exercise rather than a subscription you can pause. Count the sending addresses you want per country, add any mailbox you will use for replies, and stop there. A small team rarely needs a large tier on day one.

Your real work stays outside the product. You still research which operations managers exist at each target company, write the first line yourself, and decide which country to open next. The mailboxes carry the conversation once you have found the person worth writing to.

Moving up a tier changes one number: how many mailboxes you control. Starter holds five, Studio holds fifteen, and Floor holds fifty. For a two-person team, the jump from Starter to Studio is usually about separating countries or product lines so a poor reply rate in one place does not colour another.

More mailboxes also let you keep a dedicated address for follow-ups and a separate one for replies, which makes it easier to see which message a prospect answered. That separation is a working habit, not an extra feature, and it costs you nothing beyond the mailbox count you already paid for.

Warm-up and authentication checks sit alongside setup, so a new mailbox is not dropped into live sending with no preparation. What a larger tier does not do is fill those mailboxes with prospects. The list of operations managers remains yours to build, country by country.

Your objection is the right one: a long list of addresses that contains no decision makers wastes the mailboxes you bought. LocalSMTP does not solve that for you, and it does not claim to. Treat the tier as sending capacity, and treat the prospect list as a separate job you own.

The practical response is to qualify before you write. Pick one country, find the operations managers by name and role, and send a short first message from one mailbox. If replies come back, widen the tier later. If they do not, you have lost a mailbox rather than a year of subscription.

Keep expectations honest about delivery as well. Checks and warm-up help, but a message can still be filtered, so plan follow-ups and alternative contact routes. The tier gives you somewhere to send from; it does not promise that every operations manager reads it.

Put Starter against Studio and the difference is ten mailboxes. Starter suits a team testing one country with a single product line, where two people share a handful of addresses and reply from the same place. Studio suits a team running two countries or two offers at once and wanting each kept apart.

Studio against Floor is a wider gap. Floor gives fifty mailboxes, which is more than two people can keep warm and answer by hand. Take it only if you expect to add senders or run many separate conversations, otherwise you are paying for mailboxes that sit idle.

Read the published lifetime table on softwareprogrammer.app before you commit, because the tiers are fixed and the price is paid once. Check what sits inside your chosen tier, note that anything beyond the mailbox count is priced separately, and confirm the mailbox figure matches the outreach you can genuinely sustain.