
Mailchimp to Sendy: Cutting Email Costs - vzhou842
https://victorzhou.com/blog/mailchimp-to-sendy/
======
azca
There is a deep misunderstanding of the intricacies involved in actually
delivering an email to the inbox, repeatedly, with the lowest risk. What you
are paying for with ESP services is mostly that expertise.

~~~
tehbeard
Most of the plain ESPs like AWS SES, or mailgun accomplish that same
reliability for comparatively peanuts.

The main thing you lose with them are UX for sending newsletters, handling
bounces on those lists etc. that's what sendy covers.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
I think I'm agreeing with you, but I think that 99% of people who end up using
AWS SES will find they'll need to write a bunch of handling code on top of it
to deal with bounces (i.e. if your bounce rate is high, SES will kill your
ability to send emails).

I found it incredibly frustrating that there was functionality that should
have been easy for SES to implement, and that pretty much everyone will need
at some point, but they don't really make it easy to add on after the fact.

~~~
nullify88
It sounds like a great idea for a potential feature request for Sendy and
software like it.

SES uses SNS for bounces, complaints etc. So _really_ you need a http(s)
endpoint that receives these notifications and can act on them in a way that
you'd like. (Unsubscribing from a mailing list, analytics, etc).

------
matchagaucho
_" One downside of using Sendy is that you have to setup / host it yourself.
"_

This is the classic mistake of calculating savings purely on costs and not
factoring in time.

Pay $75 per month for hosting and 0 hours on Ops.

-or-

Pay $5 per month for hosting and 5 hours on Ops.

The latter option values your time at $15 per hour. Basically just creating a
minimum wage job for yourself.

~~~
fock
you multiply that 75$ figure times 12 (you won't spend 5h/month on a
firewalled webapps ops) and you are valuating your net (!) wage at about
100$/h (and from my experience standalone/not-internet connected "it
works"-solutions have a half life well beyond any arbitrary fiscal horizon).
While that might be in the range of a FB-SWE, for most "normal" private
ventures the mailchimp "cloud"-offering just isn't gonna be worth it. Though
one might argue, what is so private about a 10000 recipient "private" self-
marketing campaign...

~~~
fapjacks
The other thing to think about is that with self-hosted applications -- of
which I am a big proponent -- typically any extra hours of maintenance work
are usually going to hit when you least expect and/or want them to, id est
during some kind of failure mode.

------
SteveGregory
It's worth noting that there are a few open source email marketing platforms
out there too. Sendy is $60 and obfuscates some of the source code.

Mautic and Mailtrain are two that I have tried. In my experience, both have
some odd areas, but Mautic is a bit more flexible and has fewer significant
bugs.

------
kikki
Mailchimp's pricing really doesn't seem all that outrageous to me -
considering the time you state it saves

~~~
vzhou842
It’s definitely much more manageable for a business, but as one person running
a small hobby project, paying hundreds per month is nowhere near worth it.
Mailchimp is probably (understandably) focusing on enterprise customers that
can pay much more and for whom convenience is a bigger plus.

~~~
MichaelApproved
If your list is large enough to cost hundreds per month, is it still a hobby
project? Shouldn't you be able to recoup the hosting cost with all those
subscribers?

~~~
latortuga
This is the real issue. If you have 10k email newsletter subscribers and are
completely unable to monetize them such that they pay for your email sending,
that's the real problem. What's the point of having the list at this point?

~~~
rurp
Is it really inconceivable that the author has a primary goal other than
maximizing revenue?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
There's a big range between maximising revenue and 'this service can't afford
its administration costs'.

But yes, some people are happy to personally pay the costs for others to enjoy
their services.

------
jiripospisil
Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of SendingBee

If you want to use Amazon SES but prefer a hosted service, you can give us a
try ([https://sendingbee.com](https://sendingbee.com)). SendingBee among other
things has our own component based template editor that automatically
generates responsive templates that work in all major clients.

------
tannerc
Mailchimp is reasonably priced for small companies or large businesses that
can justify the cost as a business expense. But for small, bootstrapped
startups or even personal email lists—which seem to be trendy these days—it
can be very expensive.

EDIT: Why is this being downvoted?

~~~
jmduke
Hope you don't mind the plug, but my project is roughly "Tinyletter/Mailchimp
for small startups/SaaSes" —
[https://buttondown.email](https://buttondown.email)

~~~
velcrovan
Can confirm, Buttondown is awesome!

------
legitster
If price is your only concern, you can do mail merges for free and just have
your Outlook send the emails for you. But I think you would be underestimating
the value of an ESP:

\- Establishing trust is _everything_ for email. Even outside of traditional
spam filters, you need to stay outside of clutter or bulk filters as well.
Mailchimp does such a good job of cleaning their instance of spammers and spam
traps that their IP addresses are pretty trusted by inboxes. When you pay for
Mailchimp, you are piggy backing on their reputation.

\- Compliance is important and getting more important. It's real nice to just
have a service like Mailchimp just handle liability and you don't need to
worry about lawyers.

\- UX. Consumers are familiar with Mailchimp and the subscription settings,
etc. Not a big deal, but a nice way to establish trust.

But to more of a point, if you are taking on the responsibility of handling a
database of _thousands of people_ , is $30 a month really too expensive a
price?

~~~
velcrovan
Sendy is just a front end for Amazon SES, another ESP whose reputation is as
good as Mailchimp's at 1/100th the cost. We’ve never had a problem with
deliverability.

------
lukewrites
Hi Victor, since you're submitting your work here I thought it'd be OK to give
feedback to you here, too. I suggest you label your affiliate links as being
affiliate links. If you try to slip that by me, I wonder what else you're
trying to hide.

~~~
throw03172019
I do see this at the bottom of the blog. Possibly was added after your
comment.

“Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. These help support
the blog by allowing me to receive a bonus if you sign up.”

------
air7
This is an interesting business model: Sell code for a one time fee. I'm
guessing the code has no DRM or phone-home code. I'd be afraid that the code
would just be posted somewhere and I'd lose a big chunk of revenue.

~~~
vxNsr
> _This is an interesting business model: Sell code for a one time fee._

Wait are you being sarcastic? Isn't this the original business model for all
software?

~~~
air7
The original business model for software is selling compiled binaries. This is
a self-hosted PHP script with no server side functionality. It's similar to a
product shipping with it's source code.

------
RyanShook
Making templates that are nice to look at and compatible is hard. Obviously,
you can send emails for much less but I have yet to see a WYSIWYG editor as
easy to use as Mailchimp's.

~~~
cosmie
Have you checked out Mailjet[1]?

They created MJML[2], an email templating language that I've used quite a bit.
The WYSIWYG editor for Mailjet leverages it, and creates pretty slick looking
and compatible email templates if you don't want to use MJML directly.

[1] [https://www.mailjet.com/](https://www.mailjet.com/)

[2] [https://mjml.io/](https://mjml.io/)

~~~
srge
Mailjet has always been a bad service for us. Price increases, horrible
support and constant bugs.

~~~
cosmie
Oh wow! I've used them off and on, and haven't really had many issues. Albeit
I haven't run into any issues that warranted contacting support, so I have no
idea what that's like.

That said, you don't have to use Mailjet the service to use MJML the
templating language. I've also used their WYSIWYG editor quite a few times to
edit templates and export the HTML and MJML files for use elsewhere.

------
Chirael
I understand why authors do it, but to me the credibility of a post like this
is severely undermined when I see affiliate referral links.

~~~
Topgamer7
I don't even need to see affiliate links, most posts like this I assume are
incentivized.

------
sosuke
I really like the popup window for a request to subscribe to the newsletter
that says "At least this isn't a full screen popup"

------
dmje
MailChimp has gone super crappy. It's not just the pricing (the whole "we
charge for subscribers who aren't active" thing is just pure underhand
profiteering) but the damn UI is an absolute clusterf __* too. Finding
anything (forms, automation, even the last email you sent) is just awful. I
get the "groovy interface with scribbled cartoon" thing in some instances but
dammit sometimes you just need to do stuff easily and quickly rather than
being wowed by how clever and groovy a company is being with their design.

IMO they've gone from "do one thing well" to "do all the things badly". I've
gone from being lifelong MC advocate to someone who is looking for an
alternative for our clients.

Right now I'm liking MailerLite. It's like MailChimp used to be when it was
good.

~~~
hnick
I agree and we are looking to move. USD$200 per month for ~12k subscribers
isn't worth it for us, especially with such poor segmenting and automation
features. At least they finally got tags, but you can never add someone to the
same automation twice even with years between events that's dead for a lot of
use cases.

I was really looking forward to trying Drip but they doubled their prices this
year so I'm still looking around.

------
whycombagator
Perhaps it’s gotten better, but sendy for large email lists and campaigns was
pretty terrible a few years ago (some lists were > 1m records).

Not to mention the delivery rates of SES and overhead of setting up dedicated
IPs (if you have that scale).

Sendy seemed fine for small workloads, so does SES. The software is decent for
the price. But anyone serious about delivery or scale should look beyond Sendy
or an SES based tool.

There are a whole host of players that are essentially sendy as a SaaS
(moonmail, email octopus). From what I’ve heard these are alright. People
considering Sendy may wish to look into them

I’ve built and used a few products/tools that are backed by sendgrid, SES, and
mailgun. Overall, I am a fan of sendgrid but understand it’s not a direct
replacement for tools like sendy.

------
sequoia
> Image, attachment and CSV uploads requires the /uploads/ folder's permission
> to be set to 777.

\- [https://sendy.co/get-started](https://sendy.co/get-started) > Step 2

Is this really true? Why do uploaded files need to be executable?

~~~
Tomte
The _folder_ needs to be +x. So that the user can actually enter it in order
to... upload.

~~~
sequoia
Oh yeah. Haha I feel stupid now.

------
benmanns
MoonMail[0] is a similar product, but runs via Serverless framework on Lambda
and other services on AWS (or their hosted version for $$). I really love the
idea but it was a huge hassle to deploy due to many service configurations and
different Serverless framework versions. It's also somewhat expensive running
single tenant due to the minimum cost of running DynamoDB tables and Kinesis
streams (even with near 0 usage).

0: [https://moonmail.io/](https://moonmail.io/)

~~~
Brendinooo
I had a lot of problems with Moonmail. Took forever to get our domain verified
properly even though we were following all of the steps exactly, and in the
meantime their support said that the lack of verification wouldn't be a
problem, which wasn't true. Then after it was all worked out, something got
reset and we had to go through the process again.

We're still on it because we don't use email a lot and it'd be a big time
commitment to start over somewhere else, but if I was starting again I'd stay
away.

------
filmgirlcw
I’ve looked at a lot of these services built atop SES (including Sendy), but
the main problem that you still seem to have to spend a lot of time accounting
for is not getting marked as spam by clients like Gmail. There are things you
can do to help stop this, but it takes a lot of manual intervention.

In any event, it’s good stuff like this exists. I would actually be curious to
know how many email newsletter services that aren’t one of the big players
(Mail Chimp, Adobe, Constant Contact, etc) aren’t just built on SES.

~~~
robjan
I send hundreds of thousands of emails using SES per day and haven't had any
trouble. As long as you have DKIM set up correctly (and DMARC if you have a
dedicated transactional email domain) the deliverability is pretty high. When
you reach a large enough daily volume you will need to provision a pair of
dedicated IPs but they are only around $25/mo

------
dave_aiello
Victor-- you've done the community a service by showing us that There Is More
Than One Way To Do It, (TIMTOWTDI) even in the 2019 world of web services.

Don't let the nitpickers who don't like affiliate links get you down. Just
keep improving your site and providing useful info like this.

I'm glad to know somebody who went to Princeton is created such a useful site.
I live in the area. Maybe I'll see you at a Meetup sometime.

------
kilbuz
Cutting costs by 100x? What's the math on that?

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chaostheory
I switched to MailGun, after MailChimp forced everyone using Mandrill to buy
MailChimp. Years afterward, I'm still happy.

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MentallyRetired
I've been using sendinblue with good success. This author could have used
sendinblue and still been in the free plan if he spaced out his newsletter
(max 300 emails a day for free).

Even the first paid plan at $25 lets you send 40k a month, which is pretty
solid. And they have transactional as well as mailing list support.

------
bnt
One of the great features of Mailchimp (for us) is the seamless integration
with Mandrill. Our Designer creates templates, pushes them to Mandrill and
they are immediately used in production when we send out notifications.

------
matty22
I mean you could also just use any one of the other 500 different ESPs that
don't require you to host your own mail server and who have different cost
structures than MailChimp, but ok!

------
kanwisher
We moved to Drip from Mailchimp since their policies are not great. Drip is
far more functional and less then half the price but not quite this cheap

------
bijant
Rather than supporting a proprietary product like sendy I would recommend
using the far superior civicrm which is fully open source, has a great
community around it (not used by marketers and seo-spammer-types but rather by
ngo's)and is totally extensible to grow with your needs. It is simple to be
GDPR compliant by default and is really easy to get started. It obviously has
a far bigger scope but you don't need to take advantage of all that additional
functionality.

[https://civicrm.org/](https://civicrm.org/)

------
countryqt30
Is he totally confusing 100x with 10x? This is 10x cheaper, not 100x cheaper.

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kureikain
I had a very interesting setup for my news letter[0]. I let Mailchimp handle
subscription and unsubscription and deal with spam subscriber, GDPR and the
like etc.

Then I exported the CSV file and have my script[1] generate email and send it
using AWS SES. I paid about $1 per month because my server run outside of AWS.
If it were on AWS, then this AWS SES fee will be waived.

\---

[0] [https://betterdev.link](https://betterdev.link) [1]
[https://github.com/yeo/betterdev.link/blob/master/baja/fanou...](https://github.com/yeo/betterdev.link/blob/master/baja/fanout.go)

------
api
MailChimp is shockingly expensive.

------
dbancajas
question to those who do email marketing. What's the income of this look like?
you guys pulling in 6-digits per year? how long does it take to build that
kind of following?

------
johnmarcus
yeah, its like buying shitty instant coffee for 25cents - sure you saved 100x
and technically did get coffee, but none of it was enjoyable.

p.s. - sendy relies on having a cronjob running, which makes it very ill
suited for docker. there are ways to run a sidecontainer in k8s that can do
the cron part, but what a giant hassle and waste of running resources. was not
a fan.

