How to Send Emails From Your App (Free Email API Tutorial)

This is a real order confirmation email sent from an app I built with AI and getting this kind of email working is one part of the tutorial for vibe coding that nearly everyone misses. Right, your app can look finished, you can have a nice page, but if you can't send a sign up confirmation, a password reset, an order notification, a receipt, then it's not really a product that is ready for deployment yet. So today I'm adding real email functionality to a vibe coded app we're going to do it step by step and we're going to do it for free so pretty cool workflow here grab your caffeine grab your notepad we're going to get into it and by the end of this video you can do all of that again completely for free for your vibe coded app it's going to be a fun one let's go now generally why this gets skipped is it's easy to send one kind of test email but if you want to be able to send a lot of emails to your users that land in the inbox and not spam you need some kind of actual infrastructure there they can't just be sent through like a personal email address and generally you're going to need a sending service a verified sender templates and then some way to know if an email has bounced or gone to the inbox so that's kind of the workflow broken down that's what we're going to do and the tool we're doing this with is called Brevo that is B-R-E-V-O if you haven't heard of them they're a partner of this channel. It's an awesome tool. You've heard me talk about them before. And again, I really want to stress here, everything we're about to do, you don't need a credit card for. You can do completely for free for your apps. And what Brevo is, is kind of like a plug and play email infrastructure. And Brevo is kind of like a plug and play email infrastructure and backend. So you have a REST API or SMTP and things, basically emails, kind of technical, but just bounce through that. And so you can kind of think of it as just your app is going to ping Brevo, so to speak, their infrastructure like a REST API SMTP and then it's going to send emails to customers through you know that central node and then it's all going to work and there's also SMS and automations we're not going to get into that in this video we're just going to focus on setting up the email portion so we're going to jump into my computer to get started with that build now if you want to build with me so just do this step by step then this is the link on the screen to get started with and you can do this free i believe the limit is 300 emails per day with no credit card required on your account forever so literally you could send 300 emails a day for free forever so that should be enough for nearly all of you there's paid plans for over that amount but again if you want to follow along then as long as it's up to 300 per day it's going to be free with no credit card and so just follow along at this link on the screen you will learn better that way and without further ado let's get into my computer there is the craziest sunset going on behind me and i wish you could see it but you can't so i'm just going to enjoy it while we're doing these demos here we are inside of Brevo and our first step here is going to be connecting this to Claude so what we're going to do is go from Claude into settings then we're going to connectors under customize and now i'm going to search for Brevo or click on that then i'll click connect to Claude that's going to open Brevo. I'm going to go ahead and authorize it. And there we go. It's that easy. We are now fully connected and can send emails, can do all of this stuff through Brevo with Claude. Also for emails, this is what the template looks like inside of Brevo. Just keep in mind, Claude can also help you design those emails for your templates. But with this done, we're ready to get started with Brevo inside of Claude. Now there is the sender email set up and DMARC domain side of things. We've covered that in other videos, so I'm not going to go too deep into it on this one. But keep in mind, you do want to make sure you have a sender email authenticated inside of Brevo. Again, there's great videos out there, including on my channel about that. So let's say, hey, are you connected to Brevo? Okay, it's saying yes, I'm connected to Brevo. And we can re-contact create email and SMS campaigns, and create templates or send and test emails. So let's say what templates should we create for my Alto cold brew brand? Okay, and it's saying we should build a welcome email, subscribe and save and abandoned cart. Let's go ahead and say, yeah, create those templates in Brevo. So this is the first step. So what Claude is doing for us is building out the different emails that we're going to send say for our vibe coded app right and you can go through the same process of talking to the agent once it's connected so that the emails will be customized to your own business okay we can see those templates were created let's check inside Brevo and here we can see those were all created and that alone would be a few hours of work so thank God for Claude we can see that uh the design was actually done by Claude as well in MCP in addition to the contents of the email. Okay, we can see the template was saved and activated successfully. So I've gone ahead and activated three of these. And now we can send a test email to see how all of this actually works. So I'm just going to say send a test email and use one of the active templates. Okay, and now we're going to blur this, but we can see this email just came in not to spam directly to inbox one minute ago from Alto. And if we press on this, we can see the super nice design for the email and subscribe. So a legitimate email. And again, all of this was done just by talking to Claude. And that's really the core flow I want to impart here, because you make the connection, you set up the sender side of things, and then pretty much any email infrastructure you want. It's that easy. You just talk to Claude. If I was building an app, I could say something like integrate Brevo emails using those templates into the app, right it would go ahead and start programming that and on the free plan you send up to 300 emails a day just scales beyond that and don't even get me started on the SMS and all the other features inside of here that you can start to pull in as well and Claude has access to all of that through the MCP, so kudos to Brevo for building this and that is email with Claude and like I said overall Brevo is a partner to the channel, they're sponsoring this video but my genuine honest take on the drawbacks and the advantages here is it's free and it works. It is a great solution. I think for people who want to plug and play kind of free solution for that under 300 emails a day limit. I think the templates are good as well. The hardest part or what I don't like as much about the process is the domain setup, but that is really important. It's a critical part because that is what keeps you out of spam. Now it is easier to use Lovable specifically since they have kind of the native Brevo connector. So my piece of advice there is if you don't use Lovable, you use a, you know, Cursor, v0 code, anything like that, just make sure you do the domain things properly, take your time, and that'll make sure that your emails land in the inbox and they don't go to spam. And so there you go. I hope I have transmuted what you need to know to be able to send emails with your v0 coded app. If you do want to support this YouTube channel and you want to upgrade to more than 300 emails a day or get added functionality, then you can get 50% off your first three months on the starter and the standard plans using the code in the description or just comment Brevo, B-R-E-V-O under this video. And overall, just go build some cool stuff because now you can. We live in this awesome era of AI-infused, AI-powered creation. Don't let AI do all of it, right? have an idea then go execute on the idea with AI but go do that, go absolutely do that, go crazy with it and send some emails along the way, that's the video, appreciate you being here and I'll see you in the next one