Why does every SaaS still send confirmation emails?

Because confirmation emails do three jobs at once: they prove the action happened, they reduce support tickets, and they keep you out of legal trouble.

When someone signs up for your SaaS, buys something, or resets a password, they're waiting for that confirmation. It's not just reassurance (though that helps). It's proof. If a payment goes through or an account gets created, users expect a receipt. Without it, they'll email your support team asking if it worked. Or worse, they'll assume it didn't and try again, creating duplicate accounts or double charges.

Confirmation emails also create a compliance trail. CAN-SPAM requires commercial senders to honor opt-outs, and GDPR requires proof of consent. A confirmation email timestamped with what the user agreed to is your evidence if anyone questions it later. Lawyers love transactional emails because they're defensible.

And here's the business angle: transactional emails have fifty to eighty percent open rates, compared to twenty percent for marketing emails. People actually read these. That makes them the most reliable way to onboard a user, deliver login credentials, or confirm a subscription change. If you skip the confirmation step, you're betting users will remember what they signed up for and how to access it. (They won't.)

The cost of sending transactional email is low compared to the cost of confused users. One "did my payment go through?" support ticket costs more than a hundred confirmation emails. That's why every SaaS still sends them. It's cheaper to confirm than to fix the mess when you don't.

If you're building a SaaS and debating whether to send confirmations, the answer is yes. Use a transactional ESP like Postmark, SendGrid, or AWS SES to keep your transactional stream separate from marketing. That way, when you send newsletters later, a bad campaign won't affect whether password resets get delivered.