Most waitlists are written to twice: a confirmation, and an apologetic launch announcement four months later to people who have forgotten who you are.
The gap is where the value was. Not because sending more is better — because a list you never write to is a list you never tested, and the testing is most of what a waitlist is for.
The two that are not optional
The confirmation, immediately. Verifies the address and tells them what they joined. Every Osokoro plan including Free does double opt-in, and speed matters more than content here: verification rate falls off a cliff with delay.
Something real within two weeks. This is the one that gets skipped, and it is the highest-value message you will ever send them, for a reason covered below.
Everything after these is optional and should be treated that way.
The two-week email, and why it is the experiment
Send something genuine. An update, a decision you are stuck on, a rough sketch, a question.
Then count replies. Not opens — opens are unreliable and getting worse as mail clients prefetch images. Not clicks. Replies.
If four hundred verified people receive a real email and almost nobody answers, you have learned something sharper than every positive number on your dashboard, and you have learned it months before launch. Silence is the cheapest strong signal available and almost nobody collects it, because collecting it means sending something and risking the answer.
A reply is somebody spending effort, unprompted, weeks after signing up. On the ladder of evidence a waitlist can produce, it sits one rung below money — and money is not available from a waitlist by construction.
What to send when you have no news
The hard part. You are building; there is nothing to announce; so nothing gets sent for three months.
Four things that are worth sending and are not news:
A decision you are making. "We can do X or Y first, not both. Which is worse to live without?" People answer this. The answers are useful, and asking is itself the message.
Something you learned. From the signup answers, from a conversation, from trying something that did not work. This makes the list feel like a room rather than a broadcast.
A specific question. "What are you using for this today?" — the same question that is on the form, asked again of the people who are still paying attention. The delta between the two is informative.
Progress with a caveat. "Here is what works, here is what does not, here is what I am worried about." Honest is more interesting than polished, and it is far easier to write, which means it actually gets sent.
What not to send: a monthly newsletter with nothing in it. Cadence is not a virtue. People unsubscribe from obligation, not from infrequency.
Segment before you send
The people who answered your free-text question in detail are not the same population as the ones who typed an address and left. Sending both the same thing wastes the first group.
Two segments worth having:
- Answered the questions in detail. These are your early conversations. Write to them personally if the list is small enough — under a hundred, do it by hand.
- Came through a referral and answered nothing. They arrived because a friend asked. Expect little and read their non-response as information rather than failure.
Segmented broadcasts are on Everything ($20/mo). Below that you can still export and send from elsewhere.
What the plans actually allow
The relevant constraint is sends, not contacts:
| Plan | Price | Contacts | Sends per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 50 | 100 |
| Starter | $10/mo | 2,500 | 2,500 |
| Everything | $20/mo | 15,000 | 10,000 |
| Studio | $100/mo | 100,000 | 100,000 |
Broadcasts and lifecycle email start at Everything. Free and Starter cover the confirmation and verification path, not campaigns.
When you hit the send limit, sending stops. There is no overage billing, and that is deliberate: a surprise invoice is worse than a send that waits. Credit packs exist if you need more without changing plan — 8,000 emails for $3, 40,000 for $12, 80,000 for $20. They never expire and are only consumed after the monthly allowance.
What is not built
One thing you should know before planning around it. Custom sending domains are available on Everything (one domain) and Studio (several); mail keeps using the shared domain until the DKIM records you publish have been verified.
Automatic drip sequences do not exist. There are lifecycle emails — confirmation, verification, launch, staged offboarding — and segmented broadcasts you send. There is no visual sequence builder that fires message three eleven days after message two. If your plan depends on one, it is not here.
The thing to actually measure
Replies per hundred verified subscribers, tracked over time.
Not open rate, which is unreliable. Not unsubscribe rate, which is mostly noise at these volumes. The share of a list that will spend effort talking back to you is the closest available proxy for whether you have an audience or an address book, and it is the number that predicts what happens on launch day.