Our First Technical Partner: AhaSend Delivers hank's Email
Our partners page has listed exactly one kind of partner so far: car clubs. Communities with a specific make, a specific problem, and members who need parts nobody stocks anymore.
Today that page gets a second category: technical partners. Not clubs, not sellers - the companies whose infrastructure hank actually runs on. The first one is AhaSend, and they deliver every single email we send.
Why Email Is Not a Detail Here
hank is a reverse marketplace. You post what you need, and the offers come to you. Which means that at the exact moment something happens - an offer lands, a seller replies, your part request finds a match - you are not looking at hank. You are at work, under a car, or asleep.
The only thing that brings you back is an email.
That makes email load-bearing in a way it isn't for a normal webshop. If a notification arrives twenty minutes late, the seller has already moved on. If it lands in spam, the offer might as well never have existed. A marketplace that can't reach its users isn't slow, it's broken.
And then there is the mail that isn't just important but timed: your login code. When you sign in, we email you a code that stays valid for a handful of minutes and then expires. A code that arrives after that is not a late email, it is a locked door - and requesting a new one only starts the same race again. The verification code you get when you first confirm your address works exactly the same way.
That is the sharpest version of our requirement: not "reliably, eventually", but within seconds, every time, to every mailbox provider in Europe.
So we treat sending mail as a core part of the product, not as a checkbox. Notifications are queued and retried instead of fired off and forgotten, and whoever sits at the end of that queue has to be genuinely fast and genuinely reliable, because everything else piles up behind them.
Why AhaSend
We looked at the usual suspects. AhaSend won on four points:
100% European. hank operates across seven European countries, our users are covered by the GDPR, and we take data minimisation seriously enough that it shapes our architecture. Mail addresses are about as personal as data gets. Keeping that traffic on European infrastructure was not a nice-to-have.
A boring API. Their own tagline is "delightfully boring transactional email", and honestly, that sold us. Our entire integration is a single authenticated HTTP request per message. No SDK to keep in sync, no surprise behaviour, no framework to adopt. Boring infrastructure is infrastructure you don't get paged about.
Honest pricing. Flat, published, no per-seat games and no "contact sales" wall for a small team sending a few thousand transactional messages a month.
Tooling that respects developers. A real sandbox mode that mirrors production, a CLI, and webhooks you can stream to localhost. We can test an entire notification flow without mailing a single real person.
What Changes for You
Nothing. That is the point of a good technical partner.
Your offer notifications keep arriving, in your language - hank renders every email in all seven languages we support, so a Polish seller gets Polish mail about a request written in Spanish. Nothing about your inbox changes, except that we are now a bit more confident it reaches you.
Two Kinds of Partners
Our partners page now has two shelves:
- Car clubs - communities we work with so their members can find parts across borders, like Club Nacional Seat 1430, 124, 124 Sport.
- Technical partners - the companies whose products hank is built on, starting with AhaSend.
They are very different relationships, and pretending otherwise on one flat list did neither of them justice.
If you run a club whose members hunt for parts, or a service that would make hank better under the hood, write to partner@hank.parts.
And if you are building something that needs to send email: take a look at AhaSend. We are happy customers, which is the only kind of recommendation worth anything.
Happy hanking!
Robert - hank team
