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Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database (cc.dev)
302 points by kashnote on July 23, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 101 comments
Hi all! Excited to share cc.dev after months of work and refinement.

The idea for this product came from trying to do email marketing for my side project, CubeDesk, a site where Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can time themselves, race with one another, train algorithms — it's a fun niche!

With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp. I knew AWS SES would be much cheaper, but it’s just an API with none of the other necessities you need for a robust email marketing platform.

Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was always in sync with MailChimp and the audience schema they enforced. If I wanted to email every user who had completed 10 solves, that would be a whole ordeal and eat up hours of my day.

So, I started (and am now launching):

https://cc.dev

cc.dev connects directly to your database and lets you write SQL queries to target your audience. It's backed by AWS SES, so the cost to send emails is significantly less than what you're used to seeing. Combined with a template builder, media management, and campaign monitoring, cc.dev is meant to be your final destination whenever you need to send marketing emails to your users.

Would love to hear your feedback on this! If you're interested in trying out cc.dev as your email marketing platform, shoot me an email and let's have a chat: kash at cc.dev




I think there are some good ideas here, but the target audience imho is not clear.

Email marketing cheaper is a great attention grabber: kudos for the good copywriting.

Step 1: Link to AWS SES... humm, for that your target audience must be tech-savvy.

Step 2: Query your database... humm, linking my database to a strange system? No freaking way! But assume for an instant that this would be ok. For this, your target audience again must be tech-savvy.

Step 3: Create an email template using MJML... again, for tech-savvy people, not for the average digital marketeer...

Step 4: Review and send... ok, pretty basic..

English -> SQL. Here you got me confused. For steps 1, 2 and 3, your audience must be tech-savvy. This feature doesn't make any sense for tech-savvy people. It only makes sense for the average marketeer in a small team (or solopreneur) who doesn't know SQL. But this guy would never get through steps 1, 2 and 3!

See my point?

A tech-savvy person in a tight budget would develop his own solution. Imho, not your target.

An average digital marketeer or solopreneur who doesn't know how to code and is in a tight budget could be your audience. But for that, steps 1-3 must be no-code/for dummies.

The greatest thing about the idea is "email marketing cheaper".


The target market is someone who

1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users

2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive

3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to

A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this service.

The English -> SQL thing is just a fun feature I added since I'm excited about LLMs. Comes in handy for folks who aren't SQL experts (like me).

Totally agree on the security concerns. That seems to be the main feedback in this thread and will be my main focus going forward!


Sendy (https://sendy.co/) ticks all those boxes, plus it is self-hosted, so I don't need to share my database with anyone.


Oh, one-time-fee products are so much better for users!


Or Mailcoach (https://mailcoach.app) self-hosted if you appreciate a more modern codebase


I, for the record, find this pretty interesting and am exactly in the target audience for this (down to the cubing part. Maybe I'll see you at a WCA comp sometime). I might check it out sometime. I do wish there was some kind of self hosted option though. Or a way to do this without linking any AWS credentials or database passwords.


Been wanting something like this for years over at Exponent. We do a lot of targeted and dynamic emails to our users based on their role and progress through our courses, and it’s a pain to not only synchronize the database with the mail provider, but to agree on a system for capturing the state of the user that works with the platform - we’ve ended up creating a complex system of tags that has to be maintained across both systems.

Re: non technical users, one idea would be an ability to save “audiences” using smaller SQL queries, that way non-technical collaborators could easily send a campaign to a well-defined group of users, and update the group definition once instead of across all your emails.

If you could infer the structure of the connected database automatically and control which tables are visible in the product, people might find that really helpful too (check out Metabase as an example product that does a great job at querying data sources with UI and raw SQL)


My first thought when I read this post was “did you try someone besides MailChimp?” My understanding is that they’re not really a market leader and that there are competing solutions that are either better, cheaper, or both.

That said I think this is an interesting niche to be in, because I think there are some customers out there who don’t need the technical hand-holding of other marketing platforms.


How do you define market leader? In 2021 they had 14 million paying customers and a market share of 72 percent. If that’s not a market leading position, I don’t know what is. I don’t favor them, it’s a real pain sometimes, but they operate a tanker, not a speed boat.


I defined that poorly. What I mean is that they're a declining incumbent who doesn't have the best product or pricing.

While they are the market leader in marketshare, they're losing marketshare rapidly. [1]

Now that they're owned by Intuit, I only expect the product to get worse.

OP's product seems to allow you to get more specific about segmentation, which is something that a rapidly growing MailChimp competitor Klaviyo seems to excel at, as an example. [2]

Here's more discussion about email marketing automation, it seems as though there are a lot of choices: https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/wriew9/best...

I know this is probably no more than a side project for OP, but if I was in their shoes I probably wouldn't have started building this kind of thing myself if I hadn't tried at least 3 other alternatives. Email marketing/marketing automation is a very deep specialty, so I think you have to really be sure that there's nothing suitable off the shelf before you wade into building your own solution. I feel like it's not much different than building your own database for your application. I would want to be really sure that there isn't one already out there that fits my needs before building my own.

[1] https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/mailchimp-market-sha...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Emailmarketing/comments/apu08p/klav...


Also target audience here. I second the views of sibling post.


The market for entrepreneurs/companies who know how to create IAM credentials but don't have the time or skills to build an entire email marketing platform on top of Amazon SES is bigger than you think (I co-founded EmailOctopus which does the same thing without the database hookup, which is a cool idea).

Good luck with it @kashnote


EmailOctopus looks really nice! If I have a fraction of the success you guys seem to have, I'd be very happy haha


I'll update my beliefs after your data point :)

Congrats on EmailOctopus; it looks like a nice product!


I agree. It is a little confusing. As a dev I can see how it might be useful when I don't have time to build the interface. But not really sure.

Have you looked at something like https://grapesjs.com/ for templates?


> The greatest thing about the idea is "email marketing cheaper".

Welcome to customer service hell.

And the inevitable competitor who will do it cheaper. If all that differentiates you is low price, good luck.


Just want to chime in directly against the flow of negative comments re: security and say two things:

1) I too am exactly in your target audience and I'm psyched to check this out (I'm the solo tech operator of an ecom business and this will exactly scratch an itch I have)

2) I'll echo what I wrote in another comment: It is VERY HN to get concerned about exposing databases, and folks who are posting about the security concerns are not wrong, per se, but also, you are going down a path that many other SaaS apps have successfully gone down, and it's a feature users want and will pay for. So while you should absolutely make sure this is done properly and advise your users not just to expose their databases willy-nilly, don't get psyched out by folks telling you it's a hard no to have to connect a DB directly. Users want this, will pay for it, and you're wise for doing it.


How hard is it to have an API with reasonable RBAC? Why does it NEED database access?


It's more about owning your data.


> Just want to chime in directly against the flow of negative comments re: security

I wonder if these are the same people that are pushing things like Planetscale, Neon, Supabase etc. I have nothing against these services but from what I can see most users discussing these are going with the "public" database approach.

i.e. if your database is already public, what's the complaint?


> Users want this

The customers of those users absolutely do not want this. If I ever find out a company uses something like this, I'll no longer be doing business with them.

> So while you should absolutely make sure this is done properly

That is simply not possible.


Hosted Looker and many other tools are getting direct DB access these days and I'm sure you use products that do it. As an engineer I'm not a fan of it and it can often cause problems so it's best to point them at read replicas but that is not always how companies set them up.


Exactly - you beat me to it. Looker is the canonical example. I think folks would be up for a rude awakening if they really understood how many companies use Looker (or similar advanced analytics apps -- Sisense, ThoughtSpot, etc.) and how directly they connect to DBs.


> The customers of those users absolutely do not want this. If I ever find out a company uses something like this, I'll no longer be doing business with them.

I second this 100%

This for me is a major red flag. It could maybe be mitigated if OP would require customers to run their own instance of cc.dev.


Major problem with this is that your customers should ideally never expose their databases for public access.


Devils advocate here: if you created a database user, which has access to a single View of with email, name, and whatever relevant subscription properties, how is that functionally different than what everyone does today which is to set up some Rube Goldberg contraption to pipe that audience information to mailchimp, sendgrid, or exacttarget?

Personally, I find this really intriguing and think it would be much better for data security because it would be far less likely that they will have my customers’ email addresses lying around their database months or years after I cancelled the service.


you'd still be exposing the database system itself to the public regardless of the credentials you were using for the email service, as opposed to keeping it all within a VPC which seems to be what most guides recommend.

I assume the difference would be that having your database exposed presents additional surface area for attacks. A rube-goldberg style setup probably presents its own risks, but personally I just use AWS SES for my transactional/marketing emails and it's a one-way pipe that doesn't present any significant risks as far as I can see.


Using a public facing database, but using an IP address allow-list to restrict access is pretty secure. cc should publish the IP addresses they use.


It’s listed on the Data page! No need to open the database up to the whole internet. Just whitelist one IP.


Doesn't matter. The database still is on a public subnet on customer's network. All it takes is for someone to jack up some kind of white list or access rule and the entire database is exposed. It's an attack vector. You can't do this nearly as easily when the database is in a private subnet w/ no access to internet.


I mostly agree, but do want to emphasize that it really depends and there are multiple ways to secure this that range in complexity and maintenance overhead.

The top thing that comes to mind is creating a separate ‘read replica’ DB that logically replicates target table(s) from the source DB, creates a materialized view with a subset of the replicated data in the replica db, and then exposes only the materialized view to a specific 3rd party user.

That way you:

1) Run your primary db in a private subnet — addressing your concern with ip whitelisting

2) Run the replica in a public subnet with extremely limited access(ip-whitelisting and limited access controls to data).

This is definitely a more complex setup to reason about and creates more moving parts that can fall out of sync, but it does greatly decrease the blast radius of a breach, and for some orgs, that may be a worthwhile trade-off. In my opinion, the OP would probably benefit from some basic security walkthroughs on these different implementations to help engineering teams get onboarded/make a better case for their solution if they hit friction with legal or security teams.


All it takes is someone to both “Jack up some kind of whitelist” and leak their production database credentials.

Your private IP database isn’t unhackable either. A simple phishing attack can probably get someone’s VPN creds a nonzero percentage of the time.


I believe the alternative is a VPN, secure tunnel, authenticated proxy, or similar. Those also have accidental failure modes that would permit access to the DB regardless of which subnet it's in. I'd consider each of those as a second factor, in addition to the DB password.


Right. It reminds me of SetVar and GetVar as a solution to exposing state


Any serious database nowadays uses TLS and client certificates, at which point "exposing" the database is using the exact same crypto library that a VPN or jump host or what have you would use, and is just as secure.


Second devil's advocate here: I know this isn't necessarily "good" in terms of security, but it's a very common pattern for higher-level tools these days to connect directly to databases. A LOT of marketing/analytics tools support this seemingly because users want this (see: Customer.IO, Looker, etc.)

So again, I'm not saying you're wrong in that this might be a bad security practice, but OP is not alone in taking this approach and many SaaS vendors are seeing success and getting users because of it. So OP is going down a trodden path.


This feels like a very small step up from just doing everything in my codebase.

My SES is already setup. I have templating for emails already. I can query my DB using my ORM without grant additional access. I guess I get the benefits of your UI for monitoring.

I'm really not sure if the net positive is large enough for me to consider the solution.


I see a lot of security concerns with this.

Many, if not all databases are not public accessible, nor should they ever be. Asking people to open their database up to you, sketchy and dangerous.


Very legitimate concern and one I've been thinking about a lot. Honestly, I think the best way to address this is to just go open source, which I'm totally open to. I think once I've validated the idea a bit and know it's something people are interested in, I'll focus on this issue and come up with a solution (whether it's open sourcing or something else)


Going open source will not solve your problems. The issue is that youre asking customers to open database access to you/your company. The reason why the method youve chosen isnt already out there is because of all the implications it has.

You better have one hell of a security team to ensure youre locked down tighter than a ducks ass. Look at how many data breaches there have been, even in the past year.

The solution is to either make an SDK or API as already suggested by others, and giving customers endpoints to manage their lists.


Definitely taking all the security measures I can, but you're right, things can go wrong. I do encourage (and would like to enforce) that db credentials provided should have very limited read access to only the tables/columns that the user wants to query.

Having said that, it's totally understandable that some orgs won't want do open up their db. The idea with going open source would be that they can host the platform in their VPC so that their data is never leaving the premises.

Not against having an SDK or API at all, but I would need to think about would work because the whole syncing issue is one that I'm focused on addressing here.


You dont need to go open source to allow self hosting, and, youll likely lose money that way. Its entirely possible to allow self hosting without being open source. Plenty of other projects do it.

That being said, self hosting doesnt solve all issues.

You, and whoever uses this product, will need MANY IPs because of blacklisting and throttling limits applied almost worldwide to all mail servers. Theres a reason why the marketing spam hosts have their own /24 or /25 and have 80% of them cycling through usage as a mail sender.

Im not knocking your want to have something better than MailChimp and the like, but i feel like you didnt really dig into the real underlying tech and security before you went to work on this.


You realize that the sending is done by Amazon SES right?


I did not.

At that point id just configure SES outright and not even use this solution. Most other services use direct mailing from their own servers


I'm not a security expert, but at the very least if I were you make your docs very good for people who dont want to wade through 1000 different documentation to find how to very simply create a read-only user with access to specific table + columns. Or better yet even, how to create a read only view with ONLY the email/name and not any other PII, and then give access to that.


A self hosted AMI/container - with a config UX. Simple solve.


I was super excited when this popped up because I'm looking into solutions for this problem right now. I was, however, surprised to see it wasn't self-hosted or open source.

As others have mentioned, there are security issues here that would be a non-starter for me. Even just having to open a database to the open internet for an external service to connect to is too much, even if I trusted that service completely.

Self-hosted fixes these issues since outbound traffic can be locked down so only connections to SES are allowed, and no databases have to be exposed to the internet.

However, many people will also not want more than 1 service talking directly to a database for a few reasons:

1. Databases are often a single point of failure. A bad query can take down a whole service. Allowing queries that don't pass code review can be dangerous here, even if it's locked down to be read-only. This can be mitigated by talking to replica databases, but that's more setup.

2. Migrations on data that is accessed directly from multiple services becomes harder. Many server frameworks handle data migrations, and they assume ownership of the data. These frameworks cannot account for other services and cannot make sure the queries will continue to work. This is less of an issue if the query is a one-off though.

3. Having multiple services talk directly to a database pushes all the security, data validation and processing to the database. Many developers (myself included) prefer to keep database configuration as simple as possible since they are already complex.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I thought my experience might be useful in developing this! Generally, I'd love to see a simple, self-hosted MailChimp. Especially one where I could keep all the configuration in version control.


Agreed. This makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I'd rather a simple SDK that pushes the contact details to their API.


Another issue is that the data needed by this application is going to be sensitive - email addresses, names, etc. Many applications will encrypt these values with application logic. So a database function will need to perform it. The encryption key is going to be need to written into the query in this app if that works, adding more surface area to where that key lives. That's also assuming the simple use case of a single key, not per tenant, or roating, etc.


Yeah what’s the hesitation for having an API?


I think even more interesting is that they chose to forgo the rather robust and easy to use API offered by Mailchimp in the first place.


Mailchimp have already exposed customer user data. Controlling the integration in this way is likely more secure, not less.


If you send through Cloudflare Workers using MailChannels, the sending is free with no cap.


Woah cool! I actually hadn't heard of this. Would be cool if I can integrate this into the platform. Been thinking of adding other backends like Sendgrid and Resend.


The ideal way to accomplish this would be to get your customers to install a tiny proxy Worker in their own account and then just connect your service to it.

https://support.mailchannels.com/hc/en-us/articles/456589835...


Resend founder here - let's make it happen


Haven't heard of resend before. I've been pretty unhappy with Sendgrid, especially their usability when running lots of subaccounts.

Since you're here, how would you say you compare vs them or say sparkpost? I looked for comparisons on your site but I wasn't able to find anything.


I really like this. I'm an engineer, and have had to build basic versions of this internally at a previous company, and we never managed the investment to make it work nicely. This would have been a great option for us. We had an SQL database with all the data in it, and we used MJML for our emails. The only thing was that we had a fairly complex Sendgrid setup to ensure good deliverability at relatively large email scale.

However. I don't think we'd have paid for this as a SaaS service. These sorts of tools could be engineering or marketing led. We had some marketing-led tools that were fairly hands-off from engineering, but they didn't connect to our database. We happily paid for these services. However this would have been engineering led, and we'd have wanted to self-host given how it worked.

Just my 2c, but I'd either keep it engineering-targeted, open source it, and make money on support, or change tack a bit to target at the marketing folks.

And a feature request: "linting" emails. We ended up with manual checklists for things like: do all the links resolve, do they have tracking tokens, is the plaintext preview good, is there an unsubscribe link. Linting for these would be a great productivity boost.


Having your database exposed on the public internet so a third party service like this can read it directly is a very bad idea IMO. I get what your going for but the end here is some mom and pop getting their database compromised.


Honestly, you might be in the small part of SaaS well positioned to offer free trials. Since it’s not your SES, why not let someone try it for a month or two then charge?

During that time, they would have configured things and probably sent a few emails successfully. Just enough to have told their boss and gotten kudos.


great work! Useful option!! 250,000 emails at $44/mo (including SES fee).

Currently paying $25 to send 250,000 emails with sendy.co for years. Also using Amazon SES. no monthly fees just pay for what you use plus one time cost of sendy.


How do you manage reputation?


Emails are sent using your own AWS SES account, which will handle all of that. No real concern of people sending spam because they would be damaging their own SES reputation.


Well that’s not a MailChimp alternative my friend. That’s a wrapper around SNS, there’s a reason those of us in marketing wouldn’t accept this.

I don’t even like MailChimp but there’s a real reason to use an app like them/similar. They help you not screw up "all of that" is complicated.


And mailchimp is a wrapper of other tech, but it's still its own thing.


This is only true if you are using dedicated IPs with SES (~$30/month each). However, SES is pretty good at managing IP reputation even for the shared IP service, and I haven't had any issues in over 10 years of building systems on top of it.


But have you had issues when sending SES emails to Outlook/Hotmail clients? For some reason those clients block emails coming from SES


That’s because you have to pay Microsoft to send marketing email at any real volume to their services.

Typically via ReturnPath. It’s basically a scam, but everyone pays for it.


Bravo. You found a market niche! Engineers who want to set up basic email marketing for their side project or startup already using ses for login/signup and other user flows.

Don't listen to the haters -- this is exactly what many of use were looking for.

Now only if you had better priced plans for smaller volumes...


Hey this is awesome! I got started on an MVP[1] of this earlier this year, but gave up simply because of all the additional mail features required to get this to a full product.

Especially in startups, this is super annoying process. Say I want to test out a feature with 100 random users who have done XYZ before. Right now I have to do a SQL query, export that to a CSV, import to MailChimp, send.

[1] https://github.com/tylermaran/pigeon


Just wanted to say the landing page is excellent. I love the 1-2-3-4 steps with instructions and screenshots. It shows how easy it is to set up and avoids the classic marketing focus on bold headings, "personas", fancy icons, vague features…

The "Send 37 emails" button which triggers an animation is a nice touch. Foreshadows the actual experience.


Nice to see another entrant in this space, there are still very few platforms that allow you to do this and it’s, IMO, a real differentiator.


> Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was always in sync with MailChimp and the audience schema they enforced.

Could you explain why this was such a problem?

It would seem like this (API to submit data) is the sensible way to balance the cost against the security concerns raised in the other comment.

Does mean engineering and sync issues which your solution does address in an interesting way.


There can be a lot of complexities in syncing a user model into an email platform if it doesn’t match your business model.


fwiw I've been looking to find a MailChimp or such alternative that's FOSS.

I've both tried ListMonk and Bespoke but both lack on features I might need.

Might just roll my own at this point lmao

https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://listmonk.app

https://bespoke.surf/ https://github.com/bespoke-surf/bespoke

The aspect most important for me regarding this as an european based company is to be GDPR compilant so opt-in storing ip address and datetime is required by law.

What /i try to convey by this is that sending emails might be easy, but all the work around doing so lawfully is painfully burecractically comically hard.


I wish this "connect to my DB" architecture was more common in SaaS. I don't want to write synchronization code or extra APIs. Synchronization always gets out of sync anyway. I just want to set appropriate permissions for what different parties can see and do in my database.


Related: we're developing a free self-host Mailchimp alternative that we're using to send our company emails and newsletters at: https://servicestack.net/creatorkit/


The audience for this is so technical, that they just build this functionality themselves into their own app :)


> With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp.

You could always move to Brevo (formerly sendinblue) or Mailjet, it'd be cheap.

If you're sending 40k emails/mo it'd be €29-38 or €45 at Mailjet(50k)


This does seem cool. When the service matures, are you going to eventually move it to production?


The service is technically ready for use and I've already sent several thousand emails with it, but I have the Beta tag on there for now just to tell people that it's new and to reach out if they want to chat about their specific use cases before proceeding.


the biggest challenge to fix is the double opt-in and opt-outs. CANSPAM and lots of other regulations make it tricky to not do this well. And if u start getting marked as spam, then SES will ban you.

this stuff is so critical that people will not use anything other than mailchimp. if you want to disrupt this space...disrupt this part of the product.

second biggest feature - support for Liquid templates. https://dripemailtemplates.com/tutorials/liquid-templates-gu...


This looks great! Sounds like you track events like opens, clicks SES features.. does that mean you need a specific table in my database?

What data about my users would be stored in your database, vs my database?


I haven't added link tracking yet, but it's on my list. To be honest, I'm hesitant to add open tracking because it always felt a bit creepy to me and also plenty of email clients are blocking them nowadays, so they're becoming useless.

As for the data question, when you create a campaign, the following gets stored for each email that will get sent:

- email address - JSON blob of the required variables that exist in the subject and body of the email (ex: {first_name: "John"}

That's pretty much all the data that will be stored in our database which is sourced from your database. This data is stored for 30 days then removed, but I'd like to make this be configurable.


This looks like an interesting take on email marketing. I use an open source solution called Listmonk (w/ Amazon SES) for my emailing needs. How does this project compare?


Needs some sort of webhook / API access through your dashboard.

I'd be interested in running a cronjob with my custom SQL and sending you a batch payload to process the emails.


What type of tracking does it provide? Open tracking and split-tests and stats would be essential for this to stand on a more solid group beyond hacking own scripts


This is a really cool idea. Do you do any management of subscription status so that users can unsubscribe from emails? That would be really useful.


Yup! On the Data page there's an Unsubscribed list where you can import unsubbed emails. And you can include [[unsubscribe]] anywhere in an email template and that will be replaced with an unsubscribe link which the user can click.


If I have SES and MJML and the SQL query - why not just run this on my app server? Why pay you to hit the SES API with my markup?

I don't quite get it.


Because you don't have to build a feature in your own software that

- stores the templates

- selectively runs campaigns and tracks open rates etc

- create campaigns, see how many users are in there, have a safeguard before you hit "send"

- actually a nice interface.

Let's assume the "open my database to the internet" is not a dealbreaker, then this tool gets your development cost of 1-8 weeks (depends on how big the code base is) down to a 19 USD / m. Depending on where you hire / how much your time is, your opportunity cost of several thousand dollars for the feature are now much smaller.

I think there's a niche but strong case for this.

[edit: typo]


Homepage is beautiful. Product is clear. Very nice.


The killer feature of Mailchimp for me is templates. Make the editor great and I would move over quickly.


How does this connect to the database? Does an agent have to run within your VPC?


Awesome. Love the concept!


The frontend of the website is quite nice, how did you built it ?


Congrats on a solid product and good luck with launch!


Very clean! I’ll definitely try it out


Congrats on the launch!

Lots of really good stuff going on here, a few bits of feedback, ideas, etc, and also responding to some of the comments in other threads.

* The quick explanation of how this works is pretty strong, but I think the differentiator/value over other services maybe isn't called out as well. To me, this seems pretty clearly ideal for smaller teams all in on JAMstack/serverless with a lean stack that don't/won't have an easy place to create an automated process for synchronization, and are more likely to be using a planetscale/supabase/neon where this model is more attractive. I would suggest adding some of that info, not only to help target customers better recognize the value prop, but also help discovery via SEO.

* While the landing page gives a good overview, as a dev, before I sign up, I want more details of how it works, more complete examples, etc. For SaaS apps targeting the general market, after landing/product pages,the most visited pages are generally use cases, success stories, industry specific info, etc. But from my experience and talking with many others, for dev audience, docs are the next thing people visit (if they aren't ready to sign up). You don't need every doc at once, but things like a quick start guide, concept overview, feature overview, etc can all be high value docs that you generally need anyways for your first customers

* With docs, you can better address and explain the security side of things. I would do less on the landing page in regards to security and push that to more in depth detail in the docs. Talk about best practices of creating a read-only user. Create guides for most popular db vendors, etc

* As has already been mentioned, you will get concerns about any access to the db and "why not an API". I think these commenters are right that this will be a deal breaker for many companies, but I don't agree that you want an API. Not only because I think that reduces some of the value prop but also because then you would need to store customer data. I obviously don't know what you are storing today, but I would think that this model could have a big advantage if you didn't need to store any PII data in cc.dev. The complexity of dealing with compliance and regulatory requirements is no small part of why something like MailChimp is expensive is that burden. I don't know if this is something you currently consider a value prop (or if you have engineered to support this)... But I certainly would :)

* To address the reality of private dbs/giving access to a db, I would look at potentially implementing an agent. This agent would then run the queries (still provided by the user) and just-in-time deliver the results when needed. Getting the model of this right that works across different companies view of security will mean this is probably best to do with a handful of potential customers.

* As far as deployment and monetization model... I would only open source it if you are giving up on commercialization or if you can open source a subset that can be useful enough to build a community. Once again, returning to JAMstack, maybe solve in open source (but integrate) some problem unique to those teams. As far as a paid self-hosting, given that this seems like a one man show, I would resist it. Trying to do SaaS and support of self-hosting is rough, even for well funded VC backed teams..

Quite a bit here, but if you want follows up on anything, my email is in profile or will reply to comments.

Congrats again and hope it goes somewhere :)


Amazing points, thanks so much! Totally agree with you on the docs. I'll definitely look into creating some sort of agent (or some other solution), but I agree that some docs explaining everything will ease the minds of those who are on the fence.

Hm interesting point on the open sourcing and monetization. I've been thinking a lot about this and still not sure if it's wise to open source it. I definitely want to generate revenue from this. Perhaps going open source would be detrimental to that.


I should say... Open source can be a great way to get a community of users, with a subset that will opt not to self-host, but, I think there are a lot of things to consider:

* Can you shepherd a community, that will have issues with self-hosting, prs, bugs, etc AND do all the stuff needed to run a company (once again, assuming one person show here)

* By going open source, you now are also "competing" with other OSS projects, which may drive toward features that don't drive value on commercial side. You may also find that the core value prop just doesn't translate well to open source, for example, if the target is JAMstack teams and you can't run this on vercel, cloudflare, fly, etc

* I think the most successful open projects like this tend to be something that is a segment only really solved by proprietary companies. For example, workflow automation like Zapier built a novel model and led to open source with hosted version projects like n8n to replicate that, with many people offering that as a service inside their company. I think "open source MailChimp" isn't a bad play, but I don't know if that is really what you are doing, so it is hard to say if open sourcing would led to sales or to useful software that no one wants to pay for




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