"Certificate generator" and "certificate sender" get used interchangeably, but they're solving genuinely different problems — and understanding the difference explains why almost every free certificate tool stops at generation.
Turning a name, a course title and a date into a designed certificate is, technically, not hard. It's a template with placeholders, filled in per row, exported as an image or PDF. This is why so many free tools exist for it — the cost of running one is close to zero, since all the work happens in the visitor's own browser.
Emailing hundreds or thousands of certificates is a different category of problem entirely. Every mailbox provider — Gmail, Outlook, whoever — tracks the sending reputation of the account and domain behind each email. Send in volume from a shared, anonymous platform address, and a meaningful share lands in spam regardless of how good the certificate looks.
That's the reason a genuinely reliable bulk-send feature is more expensive to build and to run than a generator: it needs real mailbox infrastructure, rate-limit handling that respects each provider's own limits, and a delivery path that keeps the sender's reputation intact — normally by sending through the issuing organisation's own Gmail or SMTP account rather than a shared one.
SuTan treats these as genuinely separate: the Free plan generates and downloads certificates — up to 20 per batch as a print-ready PDF — at no cost, because that half is cheap to offer without limit. Bulk emailing is a paid feature starting at Starter, and it always runs through your own connected Gmail account or SMTP server, never a shared SuTan address.
Every certificate, sent or just downloaded, still carries the same QR-code verification — that part doesn't change based on which plan you're on.