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Day-one warm-up answer: warm-up guide and self-serve daily send caps for new domains / SES accounts #67

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Description

@clbotdev

Background

Newsletter senders leaving beehiiv are most worried about warm-up. Examples:

  • Nevo David (Postiz) on X, 17 Oct 2026: he dreads switching because he'd have to warm up email again on a new SMTP server.
  • Replies in that thread asked "How do u warm up the email?", and competitors answered "Domain warm up handled automatically".

What we have today:

  • Warmup scheduler #5 (Warmup scheduler) is an empty placeholder for automatic warm-up. That's a large feature.
  • Write a 'SendLit with Amazon SES in ~15 minutes' guide #28 covers a "SendLit with Amazon SES in ~15 minutes" setup guide. It doesn't cover warm-up.
  • Per-ESP send-rate limiting (e.g. SES max send rate) #51 covers per-ESP send-rate limiting (sends per second), not daily volume ramps.
  • There are already per-team daily/monthly quotas:
    • organizationDeliveryPolicies.defaultDailyLimit (apps/api/src/db/schema.ts:984)
    • quota.dailyLimit on team create/update (apps/api/src/team/queries.ts:114,307, packages/api-contract/src/schemas/teams.ts:60)
    • enforcement in apps/api/src/delivery/quota.ts
  • These quotas can act as a manual warm-up ramp today, but they're undocumented and there's no user-facing guidance.

We need a day-one answer before #5 ships. This blocks inviting beehiiv switchers.

Proposed fix

  1. Docs page "Warming up a new sending domain or SES account":
    • when you don't need to warm up (you keep an existing domain/IP and reputation via your own SES/SMTP)
    • SES sandbox exit and quota requests
    • a sample 2-4 week ramp table, and sending to your most engaged readers first
    • monitoring bounces and complaints via the Suppressions page and delivery events
  2. Make the existing team daily cap usable for warm-up: document it, and expose it in team settings if it isn't already user-editable on hosted.
  3. Link the page from Write a 'SendLit with Amazon SES in ~15 minutes' guide #28's SES guide and from onboarding.
  4. Leave automatic ramping to Warmup scheduler #5.

Acceptance criteria

  • Warm-up docs page published on docs.sendlit.app, with a ramp table and guidance on keeping existing reputation
  • A team owner can set or raise a daily send cap themselves (UI or documented API) on hosted
  • Broadcasts that exceed the daily cap queue for the next day instead of failing, and this is documented (verify the current quota.ts behaviour)
  • Linked from the SES guide (Write a 'SendLit with Amazon SES in ~15 minutes' guide #28) and getting-started docs
  • Warmup scheduler #5 references this as the interim solution

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