What if your email vendor disappears?A continuity plan that is a CSV in a shared drive is not a continuity plan.

It rarely arrives as a dramatic outage. More often it is a product email announcing that a plan is being sunset, that pricing is changing on a date already set, or that an account has been paused pending a compliance review with no line explaining which policy was at issue. Each version gives you a window to react that the vendor chose, not one you planned around, and each one ends the same way: your ability to send stops on their schedule.

• The access window. Export tools, when they exist, usually work only while the account is still open. Once a shutdown or freeze takes effect, the door to your own data can close with it.
• Template layouts. A campaign or transactional template built inside a vendor's editor is not a portable file; recreating the same layout somewhere else is real design and markup work, not a copy-paste.
• Domain and pool reputation. If sending ran on a shared pool or a subdomain the vendor controlled, that standing does not travel with you. A new provider, or your own account, starts that specific trust relationship over.
• Suppression and consent history. Without a record of who unsubscribed and when, and the consent basis for each address, a new sending path may not be one you can legally use for the same list on day one.

Notice that the domain itself is the one asset on this list that does not have to be the vendor's. A domain you registered and authenticated yourself keeps its own reputation regardless of which platform sends through it, which is why the export habit below treats the domain as separate from everything the vendor hosts.

Once a quarter, not once when a shutdown notice already arrived: the contact list with every field, the consent source and date for each address, the full suppression and unsubscribe history, and a static copy of each template's markup and merge fields. Store the export somewhere the vendor's account has no access to, and note the date on it, because a six-month-old export is a worse plan than it looks.

The difference matters more than it sounds. A backup answers the question "do I still have the data", and a quarterly export answers it well. A continuity plan answers a harder question: if the vendor's login stopped working this morning, how long until you send the next email, from where, and does it land anywhere but spam. A file in a shared drive answers the first question and says nothing about the second.

Own the sending domain outright, keep it authenticated wherever mail actually goes out, and keep a second sending path already provisioned, even one that sits idle most of the time. When the runtime lives in an account only you control, whether that is your own AWS account under Amazon SES or another setup you administer directly, a vendor's business decision becomes an inconvenience to work around rather than an outage that stops mail from going out at all.

SendBunny installs into your own AWS account for a one-time $199, sending through your own Amazon SES rather than a shared pool the vendor controls. Contacts, templates, suppression history and the sending domain live in your account from day one, so a change to SendBunny's own roadmap does not touch a platform that is already running under your bill. The optional $99-a-year subscription buys one-click updates; it is not what keeps the platform sending.