13 ms·

MailChimp vs. Amazon SES – How I Reduced My Monthly Bill

313 points by dreamache 9y ago

blakesterz 9y ago
That's quite a savings. Has anyone else done this? Do you see more bounces due to using the AWS servers from using SES? Ending up in more people's spam folders?
- forgot-my-pw 9y ago
  In general, other services will be cheaper than Mailchimp. I use mailjet, which has both transactional and marketing email service. Don't see any difference in bounce rate.
- a2tech 9y ago
  Nope. We're seeing only upsides (well except MailChimp's online email designer is light years ahead of the alternatives). One of our huge wins (other than price) was delivery times-we saw a distribution time for 300k emails drop from 12+ hours window to only a couple of hours.
- cuu508 9y ago
  I've done something similar for my side project which needs to receive emails. My side project is a monitoring tool, and inbound emails is one way of sending "I'm alive" messages to it. Link in profile. I started with Mandrill inbound emails. Friendly UI, easy to understand, works as advertised. Then I moved to AWS SES for inbound emails. I wrote a small Lambda function which dissects the email and forwards it to my HTTP endpoint. With usage growing, SES was getting expensive as well. So I wrote a SMTP server in Go using this: https://github.com/mhale/smtpd https://github.com/mhale/smtpd It's very basic, doesn't support SSL, but seems to work OK in practice. My inbound email handling is now basically free.
0xCMP 9y ago
While very impressive, always nice to save a lot of money, I hope someone can explain why SES is not good enough many times as I seen here on HN before. There are supposed to be issues with deliverability from SES that many can't accept and so they use other services (of which, the main one, I'm blanking on) that handle sending mail better.
- kogepathic 9y ago
  > There are supposed to be issues with deliverability from SES that many can't accept I don't know about this. At my previous employer we used SES to send service emails to our users on two domains (Office 365 hosted) and we didn't notice any delivery issues. Our volume wasn't huge though, above 10k but under 20k emails per month. That being said, Amazon will really quickly suspend your SES account if your bounce rate is too high. They also don't keep hugely detailed logs, so restoring service generally relies on you keeping good logs from your app/MTA and figuring out which email addresses are bouncing.
jtwebman 9y ago
It would been nice to see inbox stats. How many emails made it to the inbox vs spam? Did he see a drop in email opens or clicks?
- mtgx 9y ago
  Random comment on Reddit, if it helps: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3jnxep/good_riddance_mailchimp_surprisingly_greedy/curewaa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3jnxep/good_ridda...
  - jtwebman 9y ago
    Thanks that at least covers transactional style emails I would be curious for newsletters and marketing emails as well.
  - eli 9y ago
    That seems to conflate speed of sending a double opt-in with deliverability. Ideally you'd want to measure deliverability with something like Return Path.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
patsplat 9y ago
the absence of delivery stats is a key omission
- forgot-my-pw 9y ago
  Use mailjet or sendgrid for cheaper alternative with delivery stats.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    Or Sendinblue.
- dreamache 9y ago
  Mailwizz provides all of the delivery stats. Here's a screenshot I just took of a recent campaign: https://imgur.com/a/PSMm3 https://imgur.com/a/PSMm3
  - cpncrunch 9y ago
    Delivery stats aren't really very accurate these days. It's impossible to get stats for gmail web users (due to the new image caching), or for non-gmail-web users who haven't clicked "load images".
    - jazoom 9y ago
      Isn't that "open stats"?
      - cpncrunch 9y ago
        Yes, but that's the only way of knowing that it hasn't gone into the user's spam folder.
pbreit 9y ago
"The main difference between MailChimp and SES, is the fact that SES lacks many of the features from MailChimp." That's for sure. SES only has 1 feature in common with Mailchimp and that is the sending of an email. Mailchimp's primary function is managing distribution lists, email templates and receiver activity analytics.
- dreamache 9y ago
  Author here.. yeah, that's why you have to use SES with Mailwizz, which gives you all of those features from MC. So, a more accurate title would have been, MailChimp vs. SES + Mailwizz. ;)
  - JacobJans 9y ago
    I use Mailwizz, and NO it does not replicate the missing featues of Mailchimp. It may be cheap –– but you get what you pay for. It's value really depends on your needs. It is in no way comprehensive.
  - cardine 9y ago
    If Mailwizz had A/B split testing I'd consider giving it a further look. But it looks like it doesn't, and it is worth paying $240/mo (or whatever my MailChimp bill is) just for that functionality.
- nothing-special 9y ago
  SES vs Mandrill I believe would have been a better comparison here.
  - styfle 9y ago
    This would have been try a couple years ago, but every Mandrill user has a MailChimp account since the merger.
disiplus 9y ago
Its not fair to compare mailchimp to amazon ses, mailchimp is a full newsletter sending platform that handles everything. if you need only email sending there is 100k mails for 20usd with sendgrid.
- huangbong 9y ago
  Sendgrid also does marketing emails now right? Your thoughts on it?
  - chinathrow 9y ago
    You'll ned a dedicated IP as their free plans use shared IPs which are often flagged as spam sources. Source: Tried the free plan a few times.
    - NearAP 9y ago
      If you use GAE, you get a free plan on SendGrid (up to a max) and I've used it to send mails to gmail and yahoo accounts. Don't recollect anyone ending up in spam but I haven't sent them in thousands. Will keep your comment in mind as I do so..
    - nik736 9y ago
      If your sending volumes are low a dedicated IP can be worse than shared IPs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
a2tech 9y ago
We switched from MailChimp to SES+Email Octopus. EO gives us the layout+list management stuff we needed, and SES gave us a huge drop in mail sending cost. The costs we were dealing with though was a lot higher-our small list has over 100k people on it and we were sending out multiple emails a month to that list and bigger.
throwaway2016a 9y ago
Having used both I love SES. It's great. But I also like Mailchimp. One big gripe I have with SES is that it tends to have more servers on spam blacklists than Mailchimp. You also need to code a lot of the stuff Mailchimp has out of the box (like templates and delivery reports) yourself. But the capabilities are there. Another great thing SES has is the ability to receive emails not just send. But overall I like both products. Mailchimp is easy for non-tech people to use, SES is bare bones, pay as you go, and highly scriptable once you add in Lambda.
- gtsteve 9y ago
  I personally only ever used SES for forgot password notifications. My mailing list is really small right now but if I had large lists I'd probably run it myself using SES and pay for a private outbound IP. The costs aren't outrageous - $25/mo.
  - RileyJames 9y ago
    Wouldn’t spammers just do the same? Does a private IP address on SES completely absolve the senders of SES’s spam reputation? I’ve just started using SES and did notice everything going to spam. Looking for a solution.
    - eli 9y ago
      For sure you don't want to be lumped in with the people too cheap to spend $25.
    - gtsteve 9y ago
      I've never experienced an issue with e-mail going to spam. You might want to look at debugging it [0], to see if it's really SES's fault. It's possible your outbound domain has a reputation issue, but I have no idea how you address that I'm afraid. [0] https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/ https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/
benmorris 9y ago
This looks more like a pitch for MailWizz, but I've found that sendy works well for me. http://sendy.co http://sendy.co If you are comfortable setting up your own templates it does a great job sending and handling unsubscribes/statistics. It isn't simply hooked into the SES SMTP , it fully utilizes the AWS API. Sendy iteself has a simple api to add users to lists and do other common things. I've used it for years.
- godzillabrennus 9y ago
  I’ve used Sendy for years and love it.
- slig 9y ago
  I tried a year ago. Nice interface, worked fine, but the source code was a mess.
  - j_s 9y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9154021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9154021 >jmhobbs: The Sendy codebase is horrifying. We use Sendy at work, 40k+ sends weekly. It saves us boat loads of money since moving from Mailchimp. We've forked it, patched it, and use it internally, but only because it's cheaper than writing our own, for now. I'm not telling you not to buy it, I'm telling you that the guts are shitty and you should know that before you fork over cash
- mongodude 9y ago
  Sendy's templating engine is a mess, best that worked for me is to design the template in Mail chimp, export it as HTML (Mail chimp provide this as free of cost) and then, use sendy for sending mails.
  - chiefalchemist 9y ago
    Have you looked at ZURB Foundation for eMail?
- hill_smith 9y ago
laktek 9y ago
Does MailWizz or any other similar service that support the same with Mailgun?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
clairity 9y ago
are there any services (mailwizz, mailtrain, sendy, email octopus, mailjet, mailgun, etc.) that supports the personalized newsletter use case (which is "one level deeper" than the personalized email use case)? it's not obvious from any of their sites, and i'm hoping someone here might know right off the bat. =) meaning that each issue of the newsletter can include a set of like content items (e.g., articles) but the bundle of content is specific to each user (user 1 gets content items 1, 2, and 3, while user 2 gets content items 1, 3 and 5). this is one level deeper than just simple personalization like "Hi Joe, thanks for signing up with us on Saturday, Mar 4...". i've yet to see a marketing email provider offer this functionality very well, if at all. for example, sendgrid (which i'm using now) supports it via a convoluted combination of section and substitution tags that is not very well documented. but most systems (including mailchimp, constant contact, etc.) don't even contemplate this use case.
- tangue 9y ago
  This is the job of a marketing automation tool. you might have a look at Mautic, Hubspot or Marketo which will then plug into the mail sending service.
  - clairity 9y ago
    yes, i've looked at all of those too. hubspot can do it, but it's overkill for my use case (i am helping a client implement hubspot). marketo is ungodly expensive. mautic requires setting up another server and maintaining it, in php no less.
- justinator 9y ago
  Dada Mail [0] can do that (unless I'm mistaken on what you're trying to do), as its email templating language is just HTML::Template::Expr, so you can have if statements, ala:  Here's what's happening in Colorado!  It's been a feature for at least a decade, I believe. Sending via Amazon SES is also supported. [0] http://dadamailproject.com http://dadamailproject.com
cyberferret 9y ago
I'm assuming the author is hosting Mailwizz on his own desktop machine? I didn't see the costings for an EC2 instance in his AWS breakdown. If it is indeed his own machine, I wonder if he has factored in the data transfer costs to/from AWS. If he had an EC2 instance fired up, then the data transfer is free, however there is the monthly cost of the instance to consider. Also, what about the stack that Mailwizz runs on? It it available as a simple turn key virtual or docker setup, or do we need to install a LAMP stack etc. to get it running? Time to get the stack running (and maintaining it to keep running) should also be factored into the $54 licence cost of the software.
- gtsteve 9y ago
  If the author is using a micro instance in the first year, there is no charge [0]. Also, the author only needs to start the instance when he needs it, so the costs would be minimal. Furthermore, only transfer out of AWS is billed; there's no cost to upload, which is what I imagine would be the bulk of the work. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/
  - disiplus 9y ago
    how does he deal with unsubscribe if his server is offline after sending ?
    - gtsteve 9y ago
      Very good point! I guess the cheapest way to do that on AWS would be with a Lambda function. Or perhaps he already has his own web infrastructure not on AWS that contains the list.
julee04 9y ago
Check out mailforgood: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good
apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
Only tangentially related, but I could use some help. We have a nearly 10 year old newsletter service that was built long before I was hired. It's all self hosted and we're getting abysmal delivery rates now (~60%...). We're only sending about 5000 emails a week. We want to offload, at the very least, the sending onto a third party service where our delivery rates won't be so bad. The trick here is that we send the newsletters on behalf of clients that we have built sites for since we launched our newsletter service and they currently send with a FROM and a REPLY-TO of the domain we are sending for. Obviously, this does not mesh well with current spam practices. Third party services usually require you to verify the domain, but the vast majority of our clients do not have access to anything related to their domain or DNS and it's not realistic to move to SES, MailChimp, SendGrid, etc for that reason. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach fixing this? I've already asked about sending out from client-name@ourdomain.com and having a reply-to of the client's email address, but was shot down for apparent contractual reasons.
- Ascetik 9y ago
  >It's all self hosted >Third party services usually require you to verify the domain, but the vast majority of our clients do not have access to anything related to their domain or DNS Do you see the contradiction here? If you are sending it from your domain there is no issue migrating to mailchimp.
  - apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
    We spoof the client's email. So while we are sending from our IP address, the FROM is actually john@clientllc.com, the FROM name is John, and the REPLY-TO is john@clientllc.com. 10 years ago, that passed. Nowadays, it's unacceptable. I'm wondering if anyone has a solution that doesn't involve any DNS changes for the clients we are spoofing, because it just won't happen, unfortunately. Our entire newsletter is built upon email spoofing, which is a terrible practice but I cannot get management to allocate any more resources to fixing it than "just make it work again". I'm going to try to push sending out from our (verified) domain again using SMTP (so we keep our system other than the sending part), but I'm doubtful I will get the approval for that. I see the contradiction and realize that the verification process is in place for an extremely good reason, but actually implementing a fix is not as simple as you would hope. I was just hoping for someone to have an idea that I had not already thought of.
dogas 9y ago
The article is missing deliverability stats. Sure, you can reduce your bill significantly by switching to SES, but that means nothing if all of your emails are being sent to a user's spam box or promos folder. Mailchimp does a lot out of the box to ensure deliverability and good email placement, and that's part of the cost you're paying for.
- dordoka 9y ago
  That question was asked in the first comment of the article and the author posted a screenshot of stats from his latest campaign if you want to check that out.
- bobince 9y ago
  Yep. My networks refuse all mail from amazonses, as it is almost entirely spam and the abuse contact is completely unresponsive. Mailchimp isn't spam-free but it stops the spammer hitting you straight away and has human follow-up for problem cases. If that increases the price of sending mail, so be it.
  - kennydude 9y ago
    Amazon’s abuse system is automatic. At work we got a warning and then disabled after 15 minutes because people reported our emails as spam. (Apparently notifying someone they are in debt counts as spam to some)
    - TallGuyShort 9y ago
      I'm curious - do you work for a debt collector? I ask because I've been sent to collections multiple times over medical bills, and every single time it has taken hours of effort to eventually reveal that all of the documentation given to the debt collector was erroneous. Mentally, I treat it as spam because I've learned that it's going to end up being someone else's mistake that the debt collector didn't look at carefully. I would love to understand better how to deal with it - and if there's a fellow HN user who understand the debt collector business, I would like to talk to them :)
tnolet 9y ago
Mailchimp === great UI for ad hoc, "unstructered", newsletters, product updates etc. SES === great for transactional emails if you handle the templating yourself. As always, and it gets boring, it depends on what you need. If you're a typical startup you probably need both.
- phonon 9y ago
  SES just launched templating! Seems nice. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-ses-introduces-email-templates-for-sending-personalized-email/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-se... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-personalized-email-api.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-p...
  - tnolet 9y ago
    Dang, I missed that one in the daily deluge of AWS product announcements. The Mailchimp HTML5 editor is REALLY nice though. Probably the reason everyone uses them. Side story: At the former job, we used to create transactional emails with a marketing swing to them in Mailchimp. Marketing loved it! Then we'd copy and paste the HTML to our ratty Salesforce backend and replace some tags and BOOM: super nice transactional emails from SalesHorse!
    - phonon 9y ago
      Yeah, I haven't tried them out yet, but I'm a big fan of SES (for transactional emails). I use https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html for templates, and they've worked well.
- mongodude 9y ago
  Your last line summarized the whole conversation of this thread. As a startup, you do need both!
edlebert 9y ago
Aaaaaand that's why I no longer use Amazon SES for transactional mail for signupforms.com. It is frequently used by mass-marketers, which means my transactional email was frequently being dropped by some email providers because of SES's poor deliverability.
- leftnode 9y ago
  Likewise, we tried SES and had far too many emails going to our customer's SPAM folders, so we switched back to Mailchimp/Mandrill.
- barbolo 9y ago
  Are you sure SES was the problem? Did you correctly configured DKIM/SPF?
  - ryan-c 9y ago
    I've also had deliverability problems with SES, and I absolutely did set up DKIM/SPF right.
  - Maxious 9y ago
    We've occasionally got bounces like "554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [54.240.27.56] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net". Amazon say SORBS is worthless but unfortunately someone is still using them https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blacklists.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blackl...
    - spronkey 9y ago
      Seriously, doing bulk emailing you find that mail services are often the dustiest, cobwebbiest things on the internet. I swear some of these things have been sitting untouched for literal decades.
- eli 9y ago
  I thought you could buy dedicated IPs for SES? Or is that not good enough to separate you from other SES senders?
MistahKoala 9y ago
Forgive my simplistic question, but... if SES creates issues with deliverability/spam flags, is Pinpoint an option for MailWizz, Sendy etc? It looks like it's more appropriate for non-transactional email.
joering2 9y ago
I keep repeating this and just recently a friend sending large mailouts called me to confirm: you do not need Sendgrid or Mailchimp or anything else! IF you are truly not sending spam, all you need is $5/month DigitalOcean's 512MB server with not previously blacklisted IP. That's it! Paying for Mailchimp a small fortune is like paying for bottled water where all you need is $15/year Brita filter and just drink tap water. Nowadays all major email providers are really good at catching spam. If you are NOT spamming then you are good to go; the key is to start small and grow from there. Do not switch overnight and send 10,000 genuine emails letting your audience know your terms of service have changed; since they don't know your IP, they will consider spam. But if you are getting your newly subscribed audience into getting emails (confirm double opt-in) from your new IP, it will take you 2 months and approx +10% daily raise in sendout to get to $1MM emails per week from your OWN IP at $5/month rate and delivery rate will be similar to those big guys that claim they have the best delivery rate (noone can guarantee you that)! Tested and confirmed!
- sethammons 9y ago
  And if you end up on a blacklist, even if by mistake? And how do you monitor your system and stats? How do you handle throttling by different MTAs? How are you measuring opens and clicks? How are you managing unsubscribes, and soft and hard bounces? This is not to say that all of this is not something you can't tackle. Instead, many companies prefer to pay a small premium to not worry about any of that and instead focus on their core business.
  - vortico 9y ago
    As someone who's just getting into setting up mail newsletters, this is the most useful post in the thread for me, since it explains really what you're buying at MailChimp, SES, etc. I wish they would advertise this. It would be much more straightforward to someone like me.
- nothing-special 9y ago
  If you're going to do this on your own, this is fantastic advice. The ramp-up period is CRITICAL and you've hit the nail on the head. Don't forget to setup DKIM, SPF, PTR Records, etc!
cordite 9y ago
Has anyone has a weird issue where a recipient gets emails delayed by up to 45 minutes via SES, but sending via Google is received immediately? They aren't ending up in a spam folder, just delayed. Note that the email address domain is the same between these two.
- homero 9y ago
  If you're new to ses, they can throttle emails to the same domains to protect you
  - cordite 9y ago
    Mmm, this recipient has their own domain and they only get one every two to three business hours. Other places with public (gmail, yahoo) or personal domains work just fine. Sendgrid exhibited the same behavior, last I heard, sendgrid is also using SES. But sending from a gapps email was instant.
    - sethammons 9y ago
      I work at SendGrid. We don't use SES. All our receiving, processing, and delivery software (and more) is developed in-house. We also run our own data centers. However, we are looking at how we could leverage Amazon for more elastic scaling and faster API response times for our customers. But nothing with SES.
      - cordite 9y ago
        Thank you for the clarification.
zuccs 9y ago
Does anyone know of a newsletter management system with an actually decent development workflow? We don't need the WYSIWYG editor. Just something with git integration for templates that are coded manually in Zurb Foundation for Emails. You can import zipped templates into MailChimp manually. But if you made a typo, it's painful to export and reimport each time.
- fonziguy 9y ago
  Check out this Grunt workflow https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow Automates most of the painful tasks of putting an email together. You could also add a task that sends the templates to Mailchimp once built.
  - zuccs 9y ago
    Yeah, I pretty much have that with the Foundation stack (https://github.com/zurb/foundation-emails-template https://github.com/zurb/foundation-emails-template) but it's the MailChimp import that is painful!
nikolay 9y ago
Hmmm, how about Mailtrain [0], which is free and open-source? I like Sendy [1], but it's per-domain licensing policy does not work for me - I manage a bunch of nonprofits on a single droplet and do not have any desired to license all of them. [0]: http://mailtrain.org/ http://mailtrain.org/ [1]: http://sendy.co/ http://sendy.co/
nothing-special 9y ago
We send hundreds of thousands of emails every month. We're by no means a high volume sender, but we've learned a lot dealing with a bunch of these email providers. Years ago we started with AWS SES. The pricing was amazing but there was no useful customer service outlet. If you were sending via a blacklisted IP it could be weeks before you we're seeing inboxes reliability again. It wasn't uncommon for us to devote 20+ man hours per week in dealing with email issues while using AWS. Next we moved to MailGun. This was a HUGE improvement, however we were having to request to be moved to 'non-blacklisted' ip's on a regular basis. The pricing was great, but we were still having to invest too many hours dealing with email problems. Mostly fielding 'here is why your emails went to the spam filter, or why they never showed up' questions from our customers. You shouldn't need a template explaining to your customers why emails are showing up in spam boxes! To be fair, MailGun was fairly new at this point but they were VERY responsive. IP's that had been blacklisted did not stay that way for long. Lastly we moved to PostmarkApp. They were by far the most expensive ($1.50 per 1000 emails) but I only now even think of emails maybe once or twice per month. Emails just get through, no spam lists, no outages, no carrier blocks, it's amazing. Also, if you do send with enough volume you can drastically reduce the price. I believe we pay about $0.25 per thousand emails now that we purchase 5 million at a time. They could triple their price and I would eat the costs. I'm not affiliated with anyone above.
- faitswulff 9y ago
  I've also had good experiences with PostmarkApp. I thought they were a pretty small player, so I'm surprised to see that people know of it.
- disago 9y ago
  We are happy Postmark customers also, sending a couple thousand transactional emails per day. Postmark delivery rates are of the highest rates I've seen. I also appreciate how easy is to diagnose any delivery problems via their API or the web interface. In the rare occasions we've needed further details their support staff were immediately helpful. It is the most expensive service if you don't buy in bulk, but is well worth if you want to stop worrying on blacklists and other delivery problems.
- deleted 9y ago
homero 9y ago
I did the same and saved like 100x
neeraga 9y ago
That is the exact reason why we launched MailGet which is a hosted solution for sending emails using Amazon SES. Check it at https://formget.com/mailget-app/ https://formget.com/mailget-app/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
47 9y ago
In my experience Amazon SES is great if you only used it for transactional emails. If you start sending marketing emails you will soon find yourself being blocked by ISPs and email service providers. You will end up spending a considerable amount of time getting yourself unblocked. Some service providers will even block the domain name, so even switching the service won't help you. Everything will go to spam from that domain name. I have built the tech for an ecommerce startup (https://www.article.com https://www.article.com) from scratch. Using different services for transactional and marketing emails is probably one the best decision i made early on. Pro Tip #1: "Use a different domain name for the from address while sending out marketing emails" For example if your primary domain is example.com. Use support@example.com as your from address in transactional emails. Use support@example-mail.com as your from address in your marketing emails. Off course forward all emails received by support@example-mail.com to support@example.com (Why? see Pro Tip #2). Pro Tip #2: "Never use fake emails like do-not-reply@example.com for the from address for any email you sent. Yes not even for marketing emails" You will be surprised how many time customer just reply to emails they have received even if it is an unrelated marketing email. You will regularly see customers receiving a monthly newsletter and they will hit reply asking "Can you change the shipping address on my order?"
- philfrasty 9y ago
  „Use support@example-mail.com“ Is this really beneficial? With all the domain-spoofing going on I would not click a single link in an email from a domain I have never visited.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Are you in the demographic that normally clicks on links in marketing e-mails?
  - cm2012 9y ago
    You are not average.
  - hibbelig 9y ago
    It's not about clicking a link in the mail. It's about hitting the reply button in the email client.
neximo64 9y ago
Anyone who uses Amazon SES knows deliverability isn't that great. When you use mailchimp you're practically paying for a higher chance for any of your emails not ending up in the spambox (even if they're transactional).
womitt 9y ago
Lot of the IPs used be SES are already blocked because somebody used it for spamming... So would't rely on it for anything business critical to be delivered - choose a company who only asends mail (Sendgrid, Mailgun of Mandrill (know they are owned by Mailchimp). The most annoying part that i's not deterministic, sometimes it works sometime gmail blocks it or puts into spam ..
gabemart 9y ago
Mailchimp pricing has always struck me as a bit perverse. I have a mailing list of about 20k people for A Soft Murmur[1] and I send very occasional emails. A "pay as you go" Mailchimp plan costs about 1 cent per email, so in my case $200 per newsletter. But a "monthly" plan only costs $150 per month for 20k subscribers, with "unlimited" emails per month. So it's cheaper for me to go on the monthly plan for one month, even if I know I'll only send out one newsletter during that time. If there's any chance at all that I might send more than one email in that month (rare but it has happened), then it's less than half the cost. It just strikes me as weird. I should really switch to a cheaper provider, but given that I only send a handful of emails per year, I haven't found the time yet. [1] https://asoftmurmur.com https://asoftmurmur.com
Mojah 9y ago
I made the same move last year for my mailing list, but instead of Mailwizz I choose Sendy. Same setup though, using Amazon SES as the e-mail sending service. It ended up saving me $600/year back then and would - at this point - be saving me roughly $2.000/year. Here's my write-up from back then; https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-saved-600-year/ https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-saved-600-year/
- andegre 9y ago
  $2/year doesn't sound like much to me ;)
ajohnclark 9y ago
I did this with Sendy/SES and switched back to MailChimp. You can possibly watch your inbox rate plummet with your costs if you do this, maybe they improved SES since two years ago though. "You get what you pay for"
bluedino 9y ago
We use an older piece of software called Campaign Enterprise. It runs on a Windows VPS, connects to our server at Rackspace that actually sends the email, and we can send as many newsletters, welcome emails, etc we want - every day. I think it was a couple hundred dollars to buy outright. Once every few months you get on a blacklist but an email or quick phone call gets you removed.
strukturedkaos 9y ago
If you are looking for an alternative to Mailchimp that uses Amazon SES with dedicated IPs under the hood, check out Kevy [0]. Full disclosure, I'm the Founder of Kevy. We verify the domains of each of our customers and thoroughly review their sending practices to ensure their email sending reputation stays high. Futhermore, you can talk to a real person if you have any issues with sending / deliverability. If you are interested in a comparison of Kevy and Mailchimp, check out this blog post [1]. [0]: http://kevy.co/ http://kevy.co/ [1]: http://kevy.co/2017/03/31/kevy-comparison-mailchimp-klaviyo/ http://kevy.co/2017/03/31/kevy-comparison-mailchimp-klaviyo/

313 points by dreamache 9y ago

That's quite a savings. Has anyone else done this? Do you see more bounces due to using the AWS servers from using SES? Ending up in more people's spam folders?

forgot-my-pw 9y ago
In general, other services will be cheaper than Mailchimp. I use mailjet, which has both transactional and marketing email service. Don't see any difference in bounce rate.
a2tech 9y ago
Nope. We're seeing only upsides (well except MailChimp's online email designer is light years ahead of the alternatives). One of our huge wins (other than price) was delivery times-we saw a distribution time for 300k emails drop from 12+ hours window to only a couple of hours.
cuu508 9y ago
I've done something similar for my side project which needs to receive emails. My side project is a monitoring tool, and inbound emails is one way of sending "I'm alive" messages to it. Link in profile. I started with Mandrill inbound emails. Friendly UI, easy to understand, works as advertised. Then I moved to AWS SES for inbound emails. I wrote a small Lambda function which dissects the email and forwards it to my HTTP endpoint. With usage growing, SES was getting expensive as well. So I wrote a SMTP server in Go using this: https://github.com/mhale/smtpd https://github.com/mhale/smtpd It's very basic, doesn't support SSL, but seems to work OK in practice. My inbound email handling is now basically free.

0xCMP 9y ago

While very impressive, always nice to save a lot of money, I hope someone can explain why SES is not good enough many times as I seen here on HN before. There are supposed to be issues with deliverability from SES that many can't accept and so they use other services (of which, the main one, I'm blanking on) that handle sending mail better.

kogepathic 9y ago
> There are supposed to be issues with deliverability from SES that many can't accept I don't know about this. At my previous employer we used SES to send service emails to our users on two domains (Office 365 hosted) and we didn't notice any delivery issues. Our volume wasn't huge though, above 10k but under 20k emails per month. That being said, Amazon will really quickly suspend your SES account if your bounce rate is too high. They also don't keep hugely detailed logs, so restoring service generally relies on you keeping good logs from your app/MTA and figuring out which email addresses are bouncing.

jtwebman 9y ago

It would been nice to see inbox stats. How many emails made it to the inbox vs spam? Did he see a drop in email opens or clicks?

mtgx 9y ago
Random comment on Reddit, if it helps: https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3jnxep/good_riddance_mailchimp_surprisingly_greedy/curewaa/ https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/3jnxep/good_ridda...
- jtwebman 9y ago
  Thanks that at least covers transactional style emails I would be curious for newsletters and marketing emails as well.
- eli 9y ago
  That seems to conflate speed of sending a double opt-in with deliverability. Ideally you'd want to measure deliverability with something like Return Path.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

patsplat 9y ago

the absence of delivery stats is a key omission

forgot-my-pw 9y ago
Use mailjet or sendgrid for cheaper alternative with delivery stats.
- mtgx 9y ago
  Or Sendinblue.
dreamache 9y ago
Mailwizz provides all of the delivery stats. Here's a screenshot I just took of a recent campaign: https://imgur.com/a/PSMm3 https://imgur.com/a/PSMm3
- cpncrunch 9y ago
  Delivery stats aren't really very accurate these days. It's impossible to get stats for gmail web users (due to the new image caching), or for non-gmail-web users who haven't clicked "load images".
  - jazoom 9y ago
    Isn't that "open stats"?
    - cpncrunch 9y ago
      Yes, but that's the only way of knowing that it hasn't gone into the user's spam folder.

pbreit 9y ago

"The main difference between MailChimp and SES, is the fact that SES lacks many of the features from MailChimp." That's for sure. SES only has 1 feature in common with Mailchimp and that is the sending of an email. Mailchimp's primary function is managing distribution lists, email templates and receiver activity analytics.

dreamache 9y ago
Author here.. yeah, that's why you have to use SES with Mailwizz, which gives you all of those features from MC. So, a more accurate title would have been, MailChimp vs. SES + Mailwizz. ;)
- JacobJans 9y ago
  I use Mailwizz, and NO it does not replicate the missing featues of Mailchimp. It may be cheap –– but you get what you pay for. It's value really depends on your needs. It is in no way comprehensive.
- cardine 9y ago
  If Mailwizz had A/B split testing I'd consider giving it a further look. But it looks like it doesn't, and it is worth paying $240/mo (or whatever my MailChimp bill is) just for that functionality.
nothing-special 9y ago
SES vs Mandrill I believe would have been a better comparison here.
- styfle 9y ago
  This would have been try a couple years ago, but every Mandrill user has a MailChimp account since the merger.

disiplus 9y ago

Its not fair to compare mailchimp to amazon ses, mailchimp is a full newsletter sending platform that handles everything. if you need only email sending there is 100k mails for 20usd with sendgrid.

huangbong 9y ago
Sendgrid also does marketing emails now right? Your thoughts on it?
- chinathrow 9y ago
  You'll ned a dedicated IP as their free plans use shared IPs which are often flagged as spam sources. Source: Tried the free plan a few times.
  - NearAP 9y ago
    If you use GAE, you get a free plan on SendGrid (up to a max) and I've used it to send mails to gmail and yahoo accounts. Don't recollect anyone ending up in spam but I haven't sent them in thousands. Will keep your comment in mind as I do so..
  - nik736 9y ago
    If your sending volumes are low a dedicated IP can be worse than shared IPs.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

a2tech 9y ago

We switched from MailChimp to SES+Email Octopus. EO gives us the layout+list management stuff we needed, and SES gave us a huge drop in mail sending cost. The costs we were dealing with though was a lot higher-our small list has over 100k people on it and we were sending out multiple emails a month to that list and bigger.

throwaway2016a 9y ago

Having used both I love SES. It's great. But I also like Mailchimp. One big gripe I have with SES is that it tends to have more servers on spam blacklists than Mailchimp. You also need to code a lot of the stuff Mailchimp has out of the box (like templates and delivery reports) yourself. But the capabilities are there. Another great thing SES has is the ability to receive emails not just send. But overall I like both products. Mailchimp is easy for non-tech people to use, SES is bare bones, pay as you go, and highly scriptable once you add in Lambda.

gtsteve 9y ago
I personally only ever used SES for forgot password notifications. My mailing list is really small right now but if I had large lists I'd probably run it myself using SES and pay for a private outbound IP. The costs aren't outrageous - $25/mo.
- RileyJames 9y ago
  Wouldn’t spammers just do the same? Does a private IP address on SES completely absolve the senders of SES’s spam reputation? I’ve just started using SES and did notice everything going to spam. Looking for a solution.
  - eli 9y ago
    For sure you don't want to be lumped in with the people too cheap to spend $25.
  - gtsteve 9y ago
    I've never experienced an issue with e-mail going to spam. You might want to look at debugging it [0], to see if it's really SES's fault. It's possible your outbound domain has a reputation issue, but I have no idea how you address that I'm afraid. [0] https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/ https://sendgrid.com/blog/5-ways-check-sending-reputation/

benmorris 9y ago

This looks more like a pitch for MailWizz, but I've found that sendy works well for me. http://sendy.co http://sendy.co If you are comfortable setting up your own templates it does a great job sending and handling unsubscribes/statistics. It isn't simply hooked into the SES SMTP , it fully utilizes the AWS API. Sendy iteself has a simple api to add users to lists and do other common things. I've used it for years.

godzillabrennus 9y ago
I’ve used Sendy for years and love it.
slig 9y ago
I tried a year ago. Nice interface, worked fine, but the source code was a mess.
- j_s 9y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9154021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9154021 >jmhobbs: The Sendy codebase is horrifying. We use Sendy at work, 40k+ sends weekly. It saves us boat loads of money since moving from Mailchimp. We've forked it, patched it, and use it internally, but only because it's cheaper than writing our own, for now. I'm not telling you not to buy it, I'm telling you that the guts are shitty and you should know that before you fork over cash
mongodude 9y ago
Sendy's templating engine is a mess, best that worked for me is to design the template in Mail chimp, export it as HTML (Mail chimp provide this as free of cost) and then, use sendy for sending mails.
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Have you looked at ZURB Foundation for eMail?
hill_smith 9y ago

laktek 9y ago

Does MailWizz or any other similar service that support the same with Mailgun?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

clairity 9y ago

are there any services (mailwizz, mailtrain, sendy, email octopus, mailjet, mailgun, etc.) that supports the personalized newsletter use case (which is "one level deeper" than the personalized email use case)? it's not obvious from any of their sites, and i'm hoping someone here might know right off the bat. =) meaning that each issue of the newsletter can include a set of like content items (e.g., articles) but the bundle of content is specific to each user (user 1 gets content items 1, 2, and 3, while user 2 gets content items 1, 3 and 5). this is one level deeper than just simple personalization like "Hi Joe, thanks for signing up with us on Saturday, Mar 4...". i've yet to see a marketing email provider offer this functionality very well, if at all. for example, sendgrid (which i'm using now) supports it via a convoluted combination of section and substitution tags that is not very well documented. but most systems (including mailchimp, constant contact, etc.) don't even contemplate this use case.

tangue 9y ago
This is the job of a marketing automation tool. you might have a look at Mautic, Hubspot or Marketo which will then plug into the mail sending service.
- clairity 9y ago
  yes, i've looked at all of those too. hubspot can do it, but it's overkill for my use case (i am helping a client implement hubspot). marketo is ungodly expensive. mautic requires setting up another server and maintaining it, in php no less.
justinator 9y ago
Dada Mail [0] can do that (unless I'm mistaken on what you're trying to do), as its email templating language is just HTML::Template::Expr, so you can have if statements, ala:  Here's what's happening in Colorado!  It's been a feature for at least a decade, I believe. Sending via Amazon SES is also supported. [0] http://dadamailproject.com http://dadamailproject.com

cyberferret 9y ago

I'm assuming the author is hosting Mailwizz on his own desktop machine? I didn't see the costings for an EC2 instance in his AWS breakdown. If it is indeed his own machine, I wonder if he has factored in the data transfer costs to/from AWS. If he had an EC2 instance fired up, then the data transfer is free, however there is the monthly cost of the instance to consider. Also, what about the stack that Mailwizz runs on? It it available as a simple turn key virtual or docker setup, or do we need to install a LAMP stack etc. to get it running? Time to get the stack running (and maintaining it to keep running) should also be factored into the $54 licence cost of the software.

gtsteve 9y ago
If the author is using a micro instance in the first year, there is no charge [0]. Also, the author only needs to start the instance when he needs it, so the costs would be minimal. Furthermore, only transfer out of AWS is billed; there's no cost to upload, which is what I imagine would be the bulk of the work. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/free/ https://aws.amazon.com/free/
- disiplus 9y ago
  how does he deal with unsubscribe if his server is offline after sending ?
  - gtsteve 9y ago
    Very good point! I guess the cheapest way to do that on AWS would be with a Lambda function. Or perhaps he already has his own web infrastructure not on AWS that contains the list.

julee04 9y ago

Check out mailforgood: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/mail-for-good

apocalyptic0n3 9y ago

Only tangentially related, but I could use some help. We have a nearly 10 year old newsletter service that was built long before I was hired. It's all self hosted and we're getting abysmal delivery rates now (~60%...). We're only sending about 5000 emails a week. We want to offload, at the very least, the sending onto a third party service where our delivery rates won't be so bad. The trick here is that we send the newsletters on behalf of clients that we have built sites for since we launched our newsletter service and they currently send with a FROM and a REPLY-TO of the domain we are sending for. Obviously, this does not mesh well with current spam practices. Third party services usually require you to verify the domain, but the vast majority of our clients do not have access to anything related to their domain or DNS and it's not realistic to move to SES, MailChimp, SendGrid, etc for that reason. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to approach fixing this? I've already asked about sending out from client-name@ourdomain.com and having a reply-to of the client's email address, but was shot down for apparent contractual reasons.

Ascetik 9y ago
>It's all self hosted >Third party services usually require you to verify the domain, but the vast majority of our clients do not have access to anything related to their domain or DNS Do you see the contradiction here? If you are sending it from your domain there is no issue migrating to mailchimp.
- apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
  We spoof the client's email. So while we are sending from our IP address, the FROM is actually john@clientllc.com, the FROM name is John, and the REPLY-TO is john@clientllc.com. 10 years ago, that passed. Nowadays, it's unacceptable. I'm wondering if anyone has a solution that doesn't involve any DNS changes for the clients we are spoofing, because it just won't happen, unfortunately. Our entire newsletter is built upon email spoofing, which is a terrible practice but I cannot get management to allocate any more resources to fixing it than "just make it work again". I'm going to try to push sending out from our (verified) domain again using SMTP (so we keep our system other than the sending part), but I'm doubtful I will get the approval for that. I see the contradiction and realize that the verification process is in place for an extremely good reason, but actually implementing a fix is not as simple as you would hope. I was just hoping for someone to have an idea that I had not already thought of.

dogas 9y ago

The article is missing deliverability stats. Sure, you can reduce your bill significantly by switching to SES, but that means nothing if all of your emails are being sent to a user's spam box or promos folder. Mailchimp does a lot out of the box to ensure deliverability and good email placement, and that's part of the cost you're paying for.

dordoka 9y ago
That question was asked in the first comment of the article and the author posted a screenshot of stats from his latest campaign if you want to check that out.
bobince 9y ago
Yep. My networks refuse all mail from amazonses, as it is almost entirely spam and the abuse contact is completely unresponsive. Mailchimp isn't spam-free but it stops the spammer hitting you straight away and has human follow-up for problem cases. If that increases the price of sending mail, so be it.
- kennydude 9y ago
  Amazon’s abuse system is automatic. At work we got a warning and then disabled after 15 minutes because people reported our emails as spam. (Apparently notifying someone they are in debt counts as spam to some)
  - TallGuyShort 9y ago
    I'm curious - do you work for a debt collector? I ask because I've been sent to collections multiple times over medical bills, and every single time it has taken hours of effort to eventually reveal that all of the documentation given to the debt collector was erroneous. Mentally, I treat it as spam because I've learned that it's going to end up being someone else's mistake that the debt collector didn't look at carefully. I would love to understand better how to deal with it - and if there's a fellow HN user who understand the debt collector business, I would like to talk to them :)

tnolet 9y ago

Mailchimp === great UI for ad hoc, "unstructered", newsletters, product updates etc. SES === great for transactional emails if you handle the templating yourself. As always, and it gets boring, it depends on what you need. If you're a typical startup you probably need both.

phonon 9y ago
SES just launched templating! Seems nice. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-ses-introduces-email-templates-for-sending-personalized-email/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2017/10/amazon-se... https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-personalized-email-api.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-p...
- tnolet 9y ago
  Dang, I missed that one in the daily deluge of AWS product announcements. The Mailchimp HTML5 editor is REALLY nice though. Probably the reason everyone uses them. Side story: At the former job, we used to create transactional emails with a marketing swing to them in Mailchimp. Marketing loved it! Then we'd copy and paste the HTML to our ratty Salesforce backend and replace some tags and BOOM: super nice transactional emails from SalesHorse!
  - phonon 9y ago
    Yeah, I haven't tried them out yet, but I'm a big fan of SES (for transactional emails). I use https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html https://foundation.zurb.com/emails/email-templates.html for templates, and they've worked well.
mongodude 9y ago
Your last line summarized the whole conversation of this thread. As a startup, you do need both!

edlebert 9y ago

Aaaaaand that's why I no longer use Amazon SES for transactional mail for signupforms.com. It is frequently used by mass-marketers, which means my transactional email was frequently being dropped by some email providers because of SES's poor deliverability.

leftnode 9y ago
Likewise, we tried SES and had far too many emails going to our customer's SPAM folders, so we switched back to Mailchimp/Mandrill.
barbolo 9y ago
Are you sure SES was the problem? Did you correctly configured DKIM/SPF?
- ryan-c 9y ago
  I've also had deliverability problems with SES, and I absolutely did set up DKIM/SPF right.
- Maxious 9y ago
  We've occasionally got bounces like "554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [54.240.27.56] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net". Amazon say SORBS is worthless but unfortunately someone is still using them https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blacklists.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/blackl...
  - spronkey 9y ago
    Seriously, doing bulk emailing you find that mail services are often the dustiest, cobwebbiest things on the internet. I swear some of these things have been sitting untouched for literal decades.
eli 9y ago
I thought you could buy dedicated IPs for SES? Or is that not good enough to separate you from other SES senders?

MistahKoala 9y ago

Forgive my simplistic question, but... if SES creates issues with deliverability/spam flags, is Pinpoint an option for MailWizz, Sendy etc? It looks like it's more appropriate for non-transactional email.

joering2 9y ago

I keep repeating this and just recently a friend sending large mailouts called me to confirm: you do not need Sendgrid or Mailchimp or anything else! IF you are truly not sending spam, all you need is $5/month DigitalOcean's 512MB server with not previously blacklisted IP. That's it! Paying for Mailchimp a small fortune is like paying for bottled water where all you need is $15/year Brita filter and just drink tap water. Nowadays all major email providers are really good at catching spam. If you are NOT spamming then you are good to go; the key is to start small and grow from there. Do not switch overnight and send 10,000 genuine emails letting your audience know your terms of service have changed; since they don't know your IP, they will consider spam. But if you are getting your newly subscribed audience into getting emails (confirm double opt-in) from your new IP, it will take you 2 months and approx +10% daily raise in sendout to get to $1MM emails per week from your OWN IP at $5/month rate and delivery rate will be similar to those big guys that claim they have the best delivery rate (noone can guarantee you that)! Tested and confirmed!

sethammons 9y ago
And if you end up on a blacklist, even if by mistake? And how do you monitor your system and stats? How do you handle throttling by different MTAs? How are you measuring opens and clicks? How are you managing unsubscribes, and soft and hard bounces? This is not to say that all of this is not something you can't tackle. Instead, many companies prefer to pay a small premium to not worry about any of that and instead focus on their core business.
- vortico 9y ago
  As someone who's just getting into setting up mail newsletters, this is the most useful post in the thread for me, since it explains really what you're buying at MailChimp, SES, etc. I wish they would advertise this. It would be much more straightforward to someone like me.
nothing-special 9y ago
If you're going to do this on your own, this is fantastic advice. The ramp-up period is CRITICAL and you've hit the nail on the head. Don't forget to setup DKIM, SPF, PTR Records, etc!

cordite 9y ago

Has anyone has a weird issue where a recipient gets emails delayed by up to 45 minutes via SES, but sending via Google is received immediately? They aren't ending up in a spam folder, just delayed. Note that the email address domain is the same between these two.

homero 9y ago
If you're new to ses, they can throttle emails to the same domains to protect you
- cordite 9y ago
  Mmm, this recipient has their own domain and they only get one every two to three business hours. Other places with public (gmail, yahoo) or personal domains work just fine. Sendgrid exhibited the same behavior, last I heard, sendgrid is also using SES. But sending from a gapps email was instant.
  - sethammons 9y ago
    I work at SendGrid. We don't use SES. All our receiving, processing, and delivery software (and more) is developed in-house. We also run our own data centers. However, we are looking at how we could leverage Amazon for more elastic scaling and faster API response times for our customers. But nothing with SES.
    - cordite 9y ago
      Thank you for the clarification.

zuccs 9y ago

Does anyone know of a newsletter management system with an actually decent development workflow? We don't need the WYSIWYG editor. Just something with git integration for templates that are coded manually in Zurb Foundation for Emails. You can import zipped templates into MailChimp manually. But if you made a typo, it's painful to export and reimport each time.

fonziguy 9y ago
Check out this Grunt workflow https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow https://github.com/leemunroe/grunt-email-workflow Automates most of the painful tasks of putting an email together. You could also add a task that sends the templates to Mailchimp once built.
- zuccs 9y ago
  Yeah, I pretty much have that with the Foundation stack (https://github.com/zurb/foundation-emails-template https://github.com/zurb/foundation-emails-template) but it's the MailChimp import that is painful!

nikolay 9y ago

Hmmm, how about Mailtrain [0], which is free and open-source? I like Sendy [1], but it's per-domain licensing policy does not work for me - I manage a bunch of nonprofits on a single droplet and do not have any desired to license all of them. [0]: http://mailtrain.org/ http://mailtrain.org/ [1]: http://sendy.co/ http://sendy.co/

nothing-special 9y ago

We send hundreds of thousands of emails every month. We're by no means a high volume sender, but we've learned a lot dealing with a bunch of these email providers. Years ago we started with AWS SES. The pricing was amazing but there was no useful customer service outlet. If you were sending via a blacklisted IP it could be weeks before you we're seeing inboxes reliability again. It wasn't uncommon for us to devote 20+ man hours per week in dealing with email issues while using AWS. Next we moved to MailGun. This was a HUGE improvement, however we were having to request to be moved to 'non-blacklisted' ip's on a regular basis. The pricing was great, but we were still having to invest too many hours dealing with email problems. Mostly fielding 'here is why your emails went to the spam filter, or why they never showed up' questions from our customers. You shouldn't need a template explaining to your customers why emails are showing up in spam boxes! To be fair, MailGun was fairly new at this point but they were VERY responsive. IP's that had been blacklisted did not stay that way for long. Lastly we moved to PostmarkApp. They were by far the most expensive ($1.50 per 1000 emails) but I only now even think of emails maybe once or twice per month. Emails just get through, no spam lists, no outages, no carrier blocks, it's amazing. Also, if you do send with enough volume you can drastically reduce the price. I believe we pay about $0.25 per thousand emails now that we purchase 5 million at a time. They could triple their price and I would eat the costs. I'm not affiliated with anyone above.

faitswulff 9y ago
I've also had good experiences with PostmarkApp. I thought they were a pretty small player, so I'm surprised to see that people know of it.
disago 9y ago
We are happy Postmark customers also, sending a couple thousand transactional emails per day. Postmark delivery rates are of the highest rates I've seen. I also appreciate how easy is to diagnose any delivery problems via their API or the web interface. In the rare occasions we've needed further details their support staff were immediately helpful. It is the most expensive service if you don't buy in bulk, but is well worth if you want to stop worrying on blacklists and other delivery problems.
deleted 9y ago

homero 9y ago

I did the same and saved like 100x

neeraga 9y ago

That is the exact reason why we launched MailGet which is a hosted solution for sending emails using Amazon SES. Check it at https://formget.com/mailget-app/ https://formget.com/mailget-app/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

47 9y ago

In my experience Amazon SES is great if you only used it for transactional emails. If you start sending marketing emails you will soon find yourself being blocked by ISPs and email service providers. You will end up spending a considerable amount of time getting yourself unblocked. Some service providers will even block the domain name, so even switching the service won't help you. Everything will go to spam from that domain name. I have built the tech for an ecommerce startup (https://www.article.com https://www.article.com) from scratch. Using different services for transactional and marketing emails is probably one the best decision i made early on. Pro Tip #1: "Use a different domain name for the from address while sending out marketing emails" For example if your primary domain is example.com. Use support@example.com as your from address in transactional emails. Use support@example-mail.com as your from address in your marketing emails. Off course forward all emails received by support@example-mail.com to support@example.com (Why? see Pro Tip #2). Pro Tip #2: "Never use fake emails like do-not-reply@example.com for the from address for any email you sent. Yes not even for marketing emails" You will be surprised how many time customer just reply to emails they have received even if it is an unrelated marketing email. You will regularly see customers receiving a monthly newsletter and they will hit reply asking "Can you change the shipping address on my order?"

philfrasty 9y ago
„Use support@example-mail.com“ Is this really beneficial? With all the domain-spoofing going on I would not click a single link in an email from a domain I have never visited.
- adrianN 9y ago
  Are you in the demographic that normally clicks on links in marketing e-mails?
- cm2012 9y ago
  You are not average.
- hibbelig 9y ago
  It's not about clicking a link in the mail. It's about hitting the reply button in the email client.

neximo64 9y ago

Anyone who uses Amazon SES knows deliverability isn't that great. When you use mailchimp you're practically paying for a higher chance for any of your emails not ending up in the spambox (even if they're transactional).

womitt 9y ago

Lot of the IPs used be SES are already blocked because somebody used it for spamming... So would't rely on it for anything business critical to be delivered - choose a company who only asends mail (Sendgrid, Mailgun of Mandrill (know they are owned by Mailchimp). The most annoying part that i's not deterministic, sometimes it works sometime gmail blocks it or puts into spam ..

gabemart 9y ago

Mailchimp pricing has always struck me as a bit perverse. I have a mailing list of about 20k people for A Soft Murmur[1] and I send very occasional emails. A "pay as you go" Mailchimp plan costs about 1 cent per email, so in my case $200 per newsletter. But a "monthly" plan only costs $150 per month for 20k subscribers, with "unlimited" emails per month. So it's cheaper for me to go on the monthly plan for one month, even if I know I'll only send out one newsletter during that time. If there's any chance at all that I might send more than one email in that month (rare but it has happened), then it's less than half the cost. It just strikes me as weird. I should really switch to a cheaper provider, but given that I only send a handful of emails per year, I haven't found the time yet. [1] https://asoftmurmur.com https://asoftmurmur.com

Mojah 9y ago

I made the same move last year for my mailing list, but instead of Mailwizz I choose Sendy. Same setup though, using Amazon SES as the e-mail sending service. It ended up saving me $600/year back then and would - at this point - be saving me roughly $2.000/year. Here's my write-up from back then; https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-saved-600-year/ https://ma.ttias.be/mailchimp-sendy-saved-600-year/

andegre 9y ago
$2/year doesn't sound like much to me ;)

ajohnclark 9y ago

I did this with Sendy/SES and switched back to MailChimp. You can possibly watch your inbox rate plummet with your costs if you do this, maybe they improved SES since two years ago though. "You get what you pay for"

bluedino 9y ago

We use an older piece of software called Campaign Enterprise. It runs on a Windows VPS, connects to our server at Rackspace that actually sends the email, and we can send as many newsletters, welcome emails, etc we want - every day. I think it was a couple hundred dollars to buy outright. Once every few months you get on a blacklist but an email or quick phone call gets you removed.

strukturedkaos 9y ago

If you are looking for an alternative to Mailchimp that uses Amazon SES with dedicated IPs under the hood, check out Kevy [0]. Full disclosure, I'm the Founder of Kevy. We verify the domains of each of our customers and thoroughly review their sending practices to ensure their email sending reputation stays high. Futhermore, you can talk to a real person if you have any issues with sending / deliverability. If you are interested in a comparison of Kevy and Mailchimp, check out this blog post [1]. [0]: http://kevy.co/ http://kevy.co/ [1]: http://kevy.co/2017/03/31/kevy-comparison-mailchimp-klaviyo/ http://kevy.co/2017/03/31/kevy-comparison-mailchimp-klaviyo/