Every product team rebuilds the same thing: a 7 AM email summarising what happened yesterday. Signups. Errors. New customers. Pipeline counts. Some teams use Looker. Some pay Zapier. Some have a sheet that nobody opens. The honest answer for most cases: 6 lines of bash, one cron entry, ship. A Linux box (or macOS) with cron Whatever query speaks to your data (psql, mysql, an API) The Nylas CLI installed and authenticated brew install nylas/nylas-cli/nylas # or: curl -fsSL https://cli.nylas.com/install.sh | bash nylas auth config --api-key YOUR_KEY Save as /opt/scripts/digest.sh: #!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail SIGNUPS=$(psql -tA -h db.example.com -U readonly app -c "SELECT count(*) FROM users WHERE created_at > now() - interval '1 day'") ERRORS=$(psql -tA -h db.example.com -U readonly app -c "SELECT count(*) FROM events WHERE level='error' AND created_at > now() - interval '1 day'") REVENUE=$(psql -tA -h db.example.com -U readonly app -c "SELECT coalesce(sum(amount_cents), 0)/100 FROM payments WHERE created_at > now() - interval '1 day'") nylas email send --to [email protected] \ --subject "Daily digest $(date +%F)" \ --body "Signups: $SIGNUPS\nErrors: $ERRORS\nRevenue: \$$REVENUE" That is it. Six lines if you count the shebang and the set directive. # /etc/cron.d/digest 0 7 * * 1-5 ops bash /opt/scripts/digest.sh 7 AM, Monday through Friday, run as the ops user. Logs to syslog by default — journalctl -u cron to inspect. Alternative Cost Flex Looker / Metabase scheduled email $50+/seat/mo Drag-drop dashboards, no script Zapier scheduled task $0.024 per run = $0.50/mo per digest Visual editor, vendor lock Internal "ReportingService" 4 weeks of eng time Future-proof This script Whatever Postgres + email cost Total For 90% of "email me yesterday's numbers" requests, the script wins. The other 10% need charts, drill-down, or non-engineering authoring — that is when Looker pays back. nylas email send --to [email protected] \ --subject "Daily digest $(date +%F)" \ --html "Daily digestMetricValueSignups$SIGNUPS" SPARK=$(psql -tA -c "SELECT array_agg(c) FROM (SELECT count(*) c FROM users WHERE created_at > now() - interval '7 days' GROUP BY date_trunc('day', created_at) ORDER BY 1) t" | sed 's/[{}]//g') # Render with https://github.com/holman/spark SPARK_LINE=$(echo $SPARK | tr ',' ' ' | spark) psql -c "\copy (SELECT * FROM yesterday_summary) TO '/tmp/digest.csv' CSV HEADER" nylas email send --to [email protected] \ --subject "Daily digest $(date +%F)" \ --body "Numbers attached." \ --attachment /tmp/digest.csv # At top of digest.sh: HOLIDAYS_FILE=/opt/scripts/us-holidays.txt TODAY=$(date +%F) if grep -qx "$TODAY" "$HOLIDAYS_FILE"; then exit 0 fi Cron runs with a minimal PATH. If nylas is in ~/.config/nylas/bin (the default install location), either symlink it to /usr/local/bin/nylas or set PATH at the top of your script: export PATH="$HOME/.config/nylas/bin:$PATH" If your job runs as a different user (e.g., ops), the install needs to be visible to that user. Per-team digests: loop over a list of recipients with for team in eng product sales; do nylas email send ...; done On-call alerts: combine with a service that emits errors to a queue, send only when count > threshold Daily metrics from Coralogix / Datadog: replace psql with the provider's CLI or curl to their API Six lines is the floor, not the ceiling. Most teams stay near the floor for years. Send email from the terminal — full nylas email send reference PowerShell email reports — same idea on Windows CI/CD email alerts — build pipeline integrations Full command reference