A dynamic image vendor evaluation checklist you can send to procurement
By Danish Mohammed, founder. 6 min read
A dynamic image vendor is judged on four things a general martech RFP never asks: what a delivered image address returns when something fails or the contract ends, what unit the bill counts, whose hostname sits in your sent mail, and what the vendor sees about your recipients. Below are twenty questions that cover those four and the usual security, team and fit questions, written so that any vendor can answer them.
Send the page to procurement as it is. Each table has the question in the first column and our own answer in the second, read from our code and documents on 23 September 2026, so you can see what a specific answer looks like before you ask anyone else for one. This is the closing chapter of choosing a dynamic image and countdown timer vendor for an enterprise email programme.
Delivered mail: the part general templates miss
An image in a sent email is fetched again every time the message is opened, for as long as the message exists. The vendor is serving your archive, not only your next campaign.
| Question to ask | EmailTimer.App, 23 September 2026 |
|---|---|
| 1. What does a delivered address return when a render fails, and with what HTTP status? | The service card below, at HTTP 200, for a bad signature, an unknown template or any error in the handler |
| 2. What does it return after payment stops or the contract ends, and for how long? | A workspace suspended at the end of the full dunning sequence serves the same card instead of the render. Published versions are kept while the account exists, as the privacy policy states |
| 3. What happens when we go over the plan in the middle of a campaign? | Emails at 80 and 100 percent. Past 110 percent, a small line of grey text is added and nothing else changes |
| 4. Can a published image be changed or deleted after a send? | A publish makes a new version and every earlier one keeps serving. A template with published versions cannot be deleted, only archived |
| 5. Whose hostname is in our sent mail, and can it be ours? | Ours by default. The Agency plan can serve from a subdomain you own; on this date the certificate step is not switched on, so check white-label domains before relying on it |
Ask every vendor for question 2 in writing. It is the one most likely to be answered with a sentence and no date, and the migration chapter explains what a vague answer costs you at the next renewal.
Metering and cost
| Question to ask | EmailTimer.App, 23 September 2026 |
|---|---|
| 6. What exactly is one billable unit: a send, an open, or an image request? | One image the service renders and sends in full, defined on how we count opens |
| 7. Does an Apple Mail prefetch count, and does a copy served from Google’s cache count? | The prefetch counts, because it is a real request. A copy served from Google’s or Apple’s own cache never reaches us and does not count |
| 8. What is the price at our volume, on your own published page, today? | Free 5,000 opens, Starter $19 for 250,000, Growth $49 for 1,000,000, Agency $149 for 5,000,000, monthly. The ladder stops at 5,000,000 |
Read every competing answer to question 8 off the vendor’s own pricing page and write the date next to it. Prices in this category move inside a week. What dynamic images cost, vendor by vendor does that arithmetic per 1,000 opens for eight vendors, including the volumes where we lose.
Security and data
| Question to ask | EmailTimer.App, 23 September 2026 |
|---|---|
| 9. Do you hold a SOC 2 Type 2 report or an ISO 27001 certificate? | No, neither |
| 10. Can you send a sub-processor list, and what does each one see? | Yes, five named, in annex 2 of the data processing addendum |
| 11. What do you store per image request, and for how long? | Time, template, client family, user agent, country and response facts, dropped after 30 days. The IP address is not stored |
| 12. Can recipient values stay out of the image address entirely? | Yes, on Growth and above: upload a list and the address carries an opaque token |
| 13. Can a recipient edit the deadline or a value in a delivered address? | No. Every address is signed with HMAC-SHA256, and a tampered one gets the service card |
| 14. Who is the contracting entity, and under which law? | Not published yet. The documents say “the operator of EmailTimer.App” and name no governing law |
Question 14 is a blocker for many procurement teams, and it is better found now than in week three. The full answers, with where to check each, are in the security review chapter.
Team and control
| Question to ask | EmailTimer.App, 23 September 2026 |
|---|---|
| 15. Can a builder change live mail without somebody else’s approval? | No. Members cannot publish; owners and admins can |
| 16. Do you support SSO, SAML or SCIM? | No |
| 17. Is there an audit log, who can read it, and can it be edited? | Yes. Owners and admins read it, and no row can be deleted for 400 days |
The roles, what each one can do and how regional teams fit, are in roles, approvals and regional teams.
Fit with your stack
| Question to ask | EmailTimer.App, 23 September 2026 |
|---|---|
| 18. Is there a documented setup for our sending platform, in its own merge language? | Guides for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Braze, Iterable, Marketo, Adobe Journey Optimizer and others under integrations |
| 19. What does Outlook for Windows show? | The first frame, which Microsoft documents. Our first frame is a complete picture with the time left at the fetch |
| 20. Can we generate per-recipient addresses from our own code? | Yes, through the REST API on Growth and above, described on the API page |
How to run the trial
Answers in writing are half of it. The other half takes an afternoon in any vendor’s free plan. Publish one image, send it to the inboxes your list actually uses, and open it in Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook for Windows. Then change one character of the signature in the address and load it in a browser: what comes back is what a broken request shows your customers. Finally, ask how you would switch off one image in mail already sent, and time how long the answer takes.
Questions and answers
Why not use a general marketing technology RFP template?
Because those templates assume the vendor’s output lives inside the vendor’s product. A dynamic image lives in mail you can no longer edit, so the questions about failure, contract end and hostnames matter more than feature lists.
Should the checklist include vendors’ published case studies?
Treat them as marketing. The answers to questions 1, 2, 6 and 14 are more telling than any customer logo, because they are the ones that are hard to write vaguely.
Sources
Related
Put a countdown in the campaign you are writing now
The free plan covers 5,000 opens a month with no card. Starter is $19 a month for 250,000.