Why SalesAsCode won't send an email you haven't read

Many AI sales tools offer to run outbound for you. You describe a buyer, approve a sequence once, and the tool sends email under your name while you get back to the product. For a founder with no sales hire, that is a tempting offer.

SalesAsCode does the research and writes the drafts, and then it stops. Every email it writes waits for you as a draft, and nothing goes out until you have read it and pressed send.

What it does before you read anything

You start by pasting your website. SalesAsCode reads it and writes a business brief in eight sections, each with its source, plus a short list of what it could not read. You correct the brief and confirm it.

Market research then proposes up to three customer profiles, and no company is researched until you approve one. The first run researches up to 10 companies, each with the reason it fits and the source that named it. A company it cannot confirm from its own website is held back. The run also finds up to 5 contacts, with the evidence for each address, and drafts an opening email for each contact it can source.

When you approve a draft, it goes to your Gmail Drafts folder and you send it from there. You can also turn on sending inside SalesAsCode, which is off by default. With it on, approving a draft sends that one email from your mailbox. Either way, SalesAsCode checks the address against your exclusion list and holds any match with the reason. An address that bounced, or that replied after the draft was written, does not get the draft. With Attio connected, a daily plan adds up to 5 companies a day and pauses while 25 drafts wait for you. The Attio connection is marked Preview, which means it was built from Attio’s documentation and has not yet been tested on a live account.

Follow-ups take the same path. The plan schedules one a month after the last message you sent, and each arrives as a new draft in Gmail. A reply, an opt-out, a bounce or an exclusion stops the sequence. The plan reaches Gmail through code that can create a draft and has no way to send one.

Your domain carries the risk

Every email from your mailbox counts toward your domain’s standing with the inbox providers. Google’s email sender guidelines require every sender to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, and recommend staying under 0.1%. Your domain also carries your invoices, your support replies and your investor updates. When enough cold email gets marked as spam, the mail you care about can follow it into the spam folder.

We chose to send from your own mailbox. Replies land in your own thread, and no outside sending service holds a copy. The cost is that each send spends reputation that belongs to you, and that is why you make each decision to send.

SalesAsCode watches the mailbox for you. It reads your domain’s SPF, DKIM and DMARC records from public DNS when you connect and once a day after that, and tells you when one looks missing. If at least 3 emails bounce and they make up 5% or more of a mailbox’s sends over seven days, SalesAsCode holds new emails from that mailbox until you resume them.

The wrong person is worse than no email

Research gets people wrong. The contact left the company in the spring, or the title means one job at a 30-person startup and another at a bank. A sequence on autopilot writes to all of them on schedule, and each recipient sees a founder who did not look.

So each draft sits beside the research it came from: the reason the company fits, the source that named it and the evidence for the address. You often know what the research cannot, such as that you met this person at a conference last month, or that their team already said no, and you can fix the draft or delete it before anyone sees it.

The email should sound like you

When a founder sells their own product, the buyer is judging the founder too. The first email is often the first thing they read from you. A SalesAsCode draft starts from your confirmed brief and the account research, and AI Assist can suggest a rewrite that you apply or undo. You make the last edit in your own words, and the reply comes back to your own inbox, where you answer it.

What this costs you

Reading every draft takes time, and the limits are set with that in mind. The daily plan stops adding work while 25 drafts wait, so the queue cannot grow faster than you read it. If you want a tool that sends a thousand emails this week without you, SalesAsCode is the wrong tool, and its homepage says so: “It is not for anyone who wants outreach sent unread.”

One exception is yours to choose. If you connect your own Instantly account, which SalesAsCode marks as a preview, approving an enrollment adds that person to your Instantly campaign, and Instantly sends the campaign’s later steps on its own schedule. SalesAsCode does not show you each of those emails, so leave Instantly unconnected if you want every message read first.

A seat costs $99 per person per month, or $1,089 a year, and includes every role. You bring your own AI provider key, and that provider bills you directly. There is no free tier and no trial, but you can run the audit on your own site before you buy, with no account.