4 ms·
Ask HN: Affordable options for maintaining promotional email lists?
I write articles online and let readers subscribe to an email newsletter if they want to keep up with new posts. I use Mailchimp which works well and handles the subscription form, double opt-in flow, and provides a nice UI for composing emails quickly. No complaints about the product.
The problem is that the pricing model seems aimed at a different kind of market. Once you get over 5k subscribers, the prices go up very fast. They charge an extra $5/month for every 200(!) additional people on the list. For my use case, that seems like highway robbery for the incremental service provided. My bill goes up nearly every week for running a very simple (and not terribly large) mailing list where I send at most a few emails a month.
Does anyone else have experience using other mailing list providers that are aimed at a consumer who doesn't want to pay thousands a year to maintain a simple email list? Any recommendations?
I'd prefer not to build my own system using Sendgrid/Mailgun/etc for this simple use case. I don't need to send any automated/transactional emails.
- taxicabjesus 10y agofeedburner (now owned by google) is a free way to email subscribers about new blog posts. http://www.taxiwars.org/ http://www.taxiwars.org/ is hosted on blogger (part of the google empire), so feedburner was easy to install. My other project uses Aweber. My friend uses our account more than I do - I have to prune the unsubscribes to keep us under 10,000 email. Looks like Aweber is about the same price as mailchimp, except they get you for an extra $80 when you break 10,000 subscribers.
- blunte 10y agoOk, I know just nearly nothing about this subject. But I can mention https://convertkit.com/ https://convertkit.com/ (ConvertKit) as I heard about them through Thinkific, and online course platform I'm starting to use. If this helps, great. If it's totally unrelated, my apologies.
- avemuri 10y agoYou could try sendy (sendy.co) - self hosted with a one time cost. Worked well for us on a $5/month vps. The UI is not as slick as mailchimp and the composer isn't as good, but it works if your needs are simple.
- ageitgey 10y agoThanks! This looks great!
- feistypharit 10y agoI've been playing with mailerlite.com, and been pretty happy.
- samtoday 10y agoIf you're interested in a fully managed service, I'm launching LearntEmail [1] very soon. Feel free to hit me up at sam@sam.today and I can get you a very good deal. [1] https://learntemail.sam.today/ https://learntemail.sam.today/
- csa 10y agoWhile I agree that they have some odd price levels (the $5 for 5601 to 5800 and then $5 for 5800 to 10000), overall it's fairly affordable for the service. $50 gets 5000, $75 gets you 10k. I suggest scouting around their price page a bit more aggressively.