Ben Ho didn't sit in a lecture hall learning about web development. He figured it out, built a studio with one other person, landed Sony and Nokia as clients, and then - when the email marketing bills got out of hand - built a product that thousands of businesses now use to send their newsletters at a fraction of the cost.
"$1 versus $150 for 10,000 emails. The math didn't need a business plan."
In 2007, Ben and Melly Fong started Hex in Singapore. Not with a pitch deck or a seed round - just the two of them, taking client briefs, building websites, and gradually accumulating a client list that would look impressive on any agency's wall. The Esplanade's anniversary site. Changi Airport. Tiger Beer. MTV. Nikon. Levi's. A studio of two, somehow doing work for all of them.
The Hex bio - written with the brevity of someone who'd rather be coding - describes Ben this way: he "knows no boundaries" and goes "where his mind and his heart takes him." His "big love of the web" is cited as his greatest professional asset. Clients called him a "superstar designer and interactive innovator" who "takes his work seriously." These aren't marketing adjectives. They're the kind of thing clients say when a two-person studio with no PR budget keeps delivering for Fortune 500 brands.
By 2012, Hex was running client email campaigns through tools like Campaign Monitor. The bills were growing as the lists grew. At some point, Ben did the comparison: Campaign Monitor charges roughly $150 to send to 10,000 subscribers. Amazon SES - Amazon's bulk email service - does the same thing for about $1. The gap is not a rounding error. It's a different business model entirely.
So in August 2012, Ben launched Sendy. A self-hosted PHP application that connects to Amazon SES and lets you send email newsletters at SES prices - not platform prices. The initial cost: $40, one time, pay once and own it forever. No monthly fee. No per-email charge beyond what SES costs. No hostage-taking.
Sendy spread through the web design community, the indie hacker community, and the small business world the way useful things spread: quietly, through word of mouth, because it worked and the economics were obvious. Over the years, the price crept up to $59, then $69. The model didn't change. You still own it. There's still no subscription. Ben still answers support tickets himself - personally, under his own name, as admin. Over 4,200 forum replies and counting.
That number - 4,200+ personal forum replies - says something about how Ben operates. There are SaaS founders who step back from support the moment they can afford to. Ben hasn't. For a product you buy once for $69, that level of sustained founder engagement is unusual. It's either genuine care for the product, genuine care for the users, or both.
Sendy isn't Ben's only side build. MockVault came first - a design mockup presentation tool built to smooth the client approval process, announced in February 2012. Then Sendy in August. Later, SUBERNOVA (a project management tool) and Cranked (a self-hosted RSS reader that surfaces content by relevance). Four products, all built while running a client studio. None of them VC-backed. None of them with growth teams or paid acquisition funnels.
Hex's website, as of the latest update, notes it is not currently accepting new projects. That sentence - sitting quietly on the homepage of a studio that once built for Sony and Changi Airport - reads differently if you know about Sendy. It reads like someone who built something that generates enough revenue that they can afford to be selective, or to step back entirely. There's no announcement. No thread about it. Just a short line on a website, and a forum somewhere with 4,200+ replies from a founder who still shows up.
Ben Ho's approach to building doesn't come with a manifesto or a podcast. No newsletters about the indie hacker mindset, no tweets about bootstrapping philosophy. He built a studio, solved a problem he had, charged a one-time fee, and kept showing up for the people who bought it. The web is full of people talking about that approach. Ben just did it.