
Ask HN: Cost of a daily newsletter - jmstfv
Given 1000+ subscribers, how much will the newsletter cost (sent daily, provider agnostic)? As subscriber base grows, can I take advantage of economies of scale? Can I do it for free, using Python?
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kureikain
Hi,

I suggest to use MailChimp, I launch my own[1] recenly and it's very reliable.
As long as the list are under 2000 subscribers, it's free to send under 12000
emails.

If you go beyond that, then it means you should have some revenus from sponsor
to cover the cost of MailChimp. MailChimp is very reliable and easier to get
started IMHO. They can easily import email from a given URL.

\---

[1] [https://betterdev.links](https://betterdev.links)

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SXX
> Given 1000+ subscribers, how much will the newsletter cost (sent daily,
> provider agnostic)?

You can check MailChimp or Amazon SES pricing for instance:

[https://mailchimp.com/](https://mailchimp.com/)

[https://aws.amazon.com/ses/](https://aws.amazon.com/ses/)

> As subscriber base grows, can I take advantage of economies of scale?

30,000 / month is not enough to get any real advantage, but if you grow large
and going to have reputation of your domain then you can certainly start
saving. When you already have working solution and send million of emails each
month it's easier to setup your own infrastructure that going to be cheaper.

> Can I do it for free, using Python?

Unfortunately 1000 daily emails is way above the line where you can use some
public SMTP provider and expect no trouble. You can of course try to set your
own server, but that would mean that some of subscribers certainly going to
miss your mail for quite some time and it's doesn't scale too well.

Gmail / G Suite have usual limit of 2000 messages per day and you can also try
other large providers like russian Yandex, but they also have about 2000
messages limit. I used both GMail and Yandex on multiple small projects for
notification / email verification and never had issues, but I only ever sent
below 500 messages / day.

If you still decide to try run your own server or use public SMTP make sure to
use and follow best practices before you start sending anything: sent from
your project public domain, add mandatory unsubscribe link and headers, only
add links to trusted domains and avoid link shorteners, make sure that you
handle rejected mail and not sent anything to deleted accounts, etc. So it's
would take weeks of work at best to setup it properly.

