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Mailchimp to Sendy: Cutting Email Costs
- countryqt30 7y agoIs he totally confusing 100x with 10x? This is 10x cheaper, not 100x cheaper.
- kikki 7y agoMailchimp's pricing really doesn't seem all that outrageous to me - considering the time you state it saves
- vzhou842 7y agoIt’s definitely much more manageable for a business, but as one person running a small hobby project, paying hundreds per month is nowhere near worth it. Mailchimp is probably (understandably) focusing on enterprise customers that can pay much more and for whom convenience is a bigger plus.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoIf your list is large enough to cost hundreds per month, is it still a hobby project? Shouldn't you be able to recoup the hosting cost with all those subscribers?
- latortuga 7y agoThis is the real issue. If you have 10k email newsletter subscribers and are completely unable to monetize them such that they pay for your email sending, that's the real problem. What's the point of having the list at this point?
- rurp 7y agoIs it really inconceivable that the author has a primary goal other than maximizing revenue?
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoThere's a big range between maximising revenue and 'this service can't afford its administration costs'. But yes, some people are happy to personally pay the costs for others to enjoy their services.
- joemi 7y agoFair point, but not everyone is in a for-profit business. Many non-profits have large email lists and little funds.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoNon-profit doesn't mean non-revenue. Any organization with a list that large should also be able to raise enough funds to cover the cost of hosting.
- joemi 7y agoSure non-profits can probably put hundreds of dollars a month towards mailchimp. But don't you think that some non-profits would rather put that money towards whatever their non-profit is about? I don't get what's so hard to believe about that.
- MichaelApproved 7y agoIt’s not hard to believe. I’m sure they’d rather put all money paid for services towards whatever their nonprofit is about. What’s your point?
- Rch_East 7y agoIt depends on your ARPU/month. 5,000 customers at $49.99 is 1c/customer/month just for email capability. There are some industries like Game Development where only one or two emails are sent to the entire distribution list per year. If you're collecting emails on game announcement at month 0, and releasing at month 24, for an average Indie game at $14.99, deducting 30% platform commission, Mailchimp costs alone represent 2.1% of your net revenue per customer - pretty extreme.
- tannerc 7y agoMailchimp is reasonably priced for small companies or large businesses that can justify the cost as a business expense. But for small, bootstrapped startups or even personal email lists—which seem to be trendy these days—it can be very expensive. EDIT: Why is this being downvoted?
- Veen 7y agoTinyLetter, perhaps.
- dewey 7y agoThat's a Mailchimp product FWIW.
- gwern 7y agoBut it has a much higher subscriber limit than Mailchimp's free tier, in exchange for losing many of the power features. (Tinyletter is where I moved my own mailing list to when I hit the ceiling: https://tinyletter.com/gwern https://tinyletter.com/gwern )
- jmduke 7y agoHope you don't mind the plug, but my project is roughly "Tinyletter/Mailchimp for small startups/SaaSes" — https://buttondown.email https://buttondown.email
- velcrovan 7y agoCan confirm, Buttondown is awesome!
- RyanShook 7y agoMaking templates that are nice to look at and compatible is hard. Obviously, you can send emails for much less but I have yet to see a WYSIWYG editor as easy to use as Mailchimp's.
- vzhou842 7y agoAgree. I’m definitely going to miss that the most.
- cosmie 7y agoHave you checked out Mailjet[1]? They created MJML[2], an email templating language that I've used quite a bit. The WYSIWYG editor for Mailjet leverages it, and creates pretty slick looking and compatible email templates if you don't want to use MJML directly. [1] https://www.mailjet.com/ https://www.mailjet.com/ [2] https://mjml.io/ https://mjml.io/
- srge 7y agoMailjet has always been a bad service for us. Price increases, horrible support and constant bugs.
- cosmie 7y agoOh wow! I've used them off and on, and haven't really had many issues. Albeit I haven't run into any issues that warranted contacting support, so I have no idea what that's like. That said, you don't have to use Mailjet the service to use MJML the templating language. I've also used their WYSIWYG editor quite a few times to edit templates and export the HTML and MJML files for use elsewhere.
- jedberg 7y agoIf you really wanted to you could set up a free mailchimp account with one recipient, use their editor to create the template and then send it to yourself, and then put that raw template into your other mail sending program.
- azca 7y agoThere is a deep misunderstanding of the intricacies involved in actually delivering an email to the inbox, repeatedly, with the lowest risk. What you are paying for with ESP services is mostly that expertise.
- edbloom 7y agoYes, but you've read Sendy is connected to SES right? So you're still getting the benefits of solid deliverability. Or are you saying SES deliverability is not as good as Mailchimp et. al?
- gscott 7y agoSES is as good as Mailchimp and very inexpensive. Too bad Mailchimp phased out Mandrill, which was reasonably priced and had a nice interface. SES has no interface at all but works great.
- verelo 7y agoThis. I will never touch mailchimp again after what they did to us when they shut down (priced out) mandrill.
- a2tech 7y agoIf you like SES you should check out Email Octopus. It hooks up to SES and gives you a nice GUI for putting the messages together. We moved a good sized client over to them and their marketing people wanted a GUI and it filled the niche nicely.
- Chirael 7y agoI understand why authors do it, but to me the credibility of a post like this is severely undermined when I see affiliate referral links.
- air7 7y agoThis is an interesting business model: Sell code for a one time fee. I'm guessing the code has no DRM or phone-home code. I'd be afraid that the code would just be posted somewhere and I'd lose a big chunk of revenue.
- kijin 7y agoParts of Sendy are obfuscated. Those parts might contain a license checking routine that phones home from time to time.
- bernardlunn 7y agoBack to the future. Selling perpetual license was the old software game - great for bootstrapping
- vxNsr 7y ago>This is an interesting business model: Sell code for a one time fee. Wait are you being sarcastic? Isn't this the original business model for all software?
- air7 7y agoThe original business model for software is selling compiled binaries. This is a self-hosted PHP script with no server side functionality. It's similar to a product shipping with it's source code.
- innocenat 7y agoIt not new. Xenforo, Vbulletin etc. has been doing this for ages.
- benmanns 7y agoMoonMail[0] is a similar product, but runs via Serverless framework on Lambda and other services on AWS (or their hosted version for $$). I really love the idea but it was a huge hassle to deploy due to many service configurations and different Serverless framework versions. It's also somewhat expensive running single tenant due to the minimum cost of running DynamoDB tables and Kinesis streams (even with near 0 usage). 0: https://moonmail.io/ https://moonmail.io/
- _wmd 7y agoDynamoDB's free tier is incredibly generous. Did you exceed it?
- Brendinooo 7y agoI had a lot of problems with Moonmail. Took forever to get our domain verified properly even though we were following all of the steps exactly, and in the meantime their support said that the lack of verification wouldn't be a problem, which wasn't true. Then after it was all worked out, something got reset and we had to go through the process again. We're still on it because we don't use email a lot and it'd be a big time commitment to start over somewhere else, but if I was starting again I'd stay away.
- SteveGregory 7y agoIt's worth noting that there are a few open source email marketing platforms out there too. Sendy is $60 and obfuscates some of the source code. Mautic and Mailtrain are two that I have tried. In my experience, both have some odd areas, but Mautic is a bit more flexible and has fewer significant bugs.
- sosuke 7y agoI really like the popup window for a request to subscribe to the newsletter that says "At least this isn't a full screen popup"
- lukewrites 7y agoHi Victor, since you're submitting your work here I thought it'd be OK to give feedback to you here, too. I suggest you label your affiliate links as being affiliate links. If you try to slip that by me, I wonder what else you're trying to hide.
- christefano 7y agoThis info is at the bottom of the article: > Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. These help support the blog by allowing me to receive a bonus if you sign up.
- dylz 7y agoThere are multiple unmarked affiliate links, and you don't know about this until the very end. I find it at least mildly scummy. A minimum of some form of (affiliate) next to each one would be nice. The FTC also does not like this behaviour of putting it very far away from all of your aff links and small: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftcs-endorsement-guides-what-people-are-asking#affiliateornetwork https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
- throw03172019 7y agoI do see this at the bottom of the blog. Possibly was added after your comment. “Disclaimer: some links in this post are affiliate links. These help support the blog by allowing me to receive a bonus if you sign up.”
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dewey 7y agoDo you also complain if there are ads on a personal blog and it's not disclosed?
- edtechdev 7y ago
- bnt 7y agoOne of the great features of Mailchimp (for us) is the seamless integration with Mandrill. Our Designer creates templates, pushes them to Mandrill and they are immediately used in production when we send out notifications.
- kilbuz 7y agoCutting costs by 100x? What's the math on that?
- api 7y agoMailChimp is shockingly expensive.
- filmgirlcw 7y agoI’ve looked at a lot of these services built atop SES (including Sendy), but the main problem that you still seem to have to spend a lot of time accounting for is not getting marked as spam by clients like Gmail. There are things you can do to help stop this, but it takes a lot of manual intervention. In any event, it’s good stuff like this exists. I would actually be curious to know how many email newsletter services that aren’t one of the big players (Mail Chimp, Adobe, Constant Contact, etc) aren’t just built on SES.
- robjan 7y agoI send hundreds of thousands of emails using SES per day and haven't had any trouble. As long as you have DKIM set up correctly (and DMARC if you have a dedicated transactional email domain) the deliverability is pretty high. When you reach a large enough daily volume you will need to provision a pair of dedicated IPs but they are only around $25/mo
- benmorris 7y agoI've used Sendy for years and haven't found this to be true at all.
- chaostheory 7y agoI switched to MailGun, after MailChimp forced everyone using Mandrill to buy MailChimp. Years afterward, I'm still happy.
- dbancajas 7y agoquestion to those who do email marketing. What's the income of this look like? you guys pulling in 6-digits per year? how long does it take to build that kind of following?
- legitster 7y agoIf price is your only concern, you can do mail merges for free and just have your Outlook send the emails for you. But I think you would be underestimating the value of an ESP: - Establishing trust is everything for email. Even outside of traditional spam filters, you need to stay outside of clutter or bulk filters as well. Mailchimp does such a good job of cleaning their instance of spammers and spam traps that their IP addresses are pretty trusted by inboxes. When you pay for Mailchimp, you are piggy backing on their reputation. - Compliance is important and getting more important. It's real nice to just have a service like Mailchimp just handle liability and you don't need to worry about lawyers. - UX. Consumers are familiar with Mailchimp and the subscription settings, etc. Not a big deal, but a nice way to establish trust. But to more of a point, if you are taking on the responsibility of handling a database of thousands of people, is $30 a month really too expensive a price?
- velcrovan 7y agoSendy is just a front end for Amazon SES, another ESP whose reputation is as good as Mailchimp's at 1/100th the cost. We’ve never had a problem with deliverability.
- kanwisher 7y agoWe moved to Drip from Mailchimp since their policies are not great. Drip is far more functional and less then half the price but not quite this cheap
- jiripospisil 7y agoDisclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders of SendingBee If you want to use Amazon SES but prefer a hosted service, you can give us a try (https://sendingbee.com https://sendingbee.com). SendingBee among other things has our own component based template editor that automatically generates responsive templates that work in all major clients.
- johnmarcus 7y agoyeah, its like buying shitty instant coffee for 25cents - sure you saved 100x and technically did get coffee, but none of it was enjoyable. p.s. - sendy relies on having a cronjob running, which makes it very ill suited for docker. there are ways to run a sidecontainer in k8s that can do the cron part, but what a giant hassle and waste of running resources. was not a fan.
- matchagaucho 7y ago"One downside of using Sendy is that you have to setup / host it yourself. " This is the classic mistake of calculating savings purely on costs and not factoring in time. Pay $75 per month for hosting and 0 hours on Ops. -or- Pay $5 per month for hosting and 5 hours on Ops. The latter option values your time at $15 per hour. Basically just creating a minimum wage job for yourself.
- detaro 7y agoOr spend 2-5 hours a year on Ops, and suddenly it looks more attractive again. You get to decide where on the range your personal preference flips, where your available skills probably put you on it and choose accordingly.
- dmarlow 7y agoIs it a one time thing or a weekly/monthly/yearly thing?
- fock 7y agoyou multiply that 75$ figure times 12 (you won't spend 5h/month on a firewalled webapps ops) and you are valuating your net (!) wage at about 100$/h (and from my experience standalone/not-internet connected "it works"-solutions have a half life well beyond any arbitrary fiscal horizon). While that might be in the range of a FB-SWE, for most "normal" private ventures the mailchimp "cloud"-offering just isn't gonna be worth it. Though one might argue, what is so private about a 10000 recipient "private" self-marketing campaign...
- fapjacks 7y agoThe other thing to think about is that with self-hosted applications -- of which I am a big proponent -- typically any extra hours of maintenance work are usually going to hit when you least expect and/or want them to, id est during some kind of failure mode.
- velcrovan 7y agoWe put Sendy on a server that we already have in use and have spent maybe 1 hour on admin work for it per year since. (Occasionally a new version comes out and you have to copy the files to the server). Plus if we had gone with Mailchimp, it's not like anyone is going to get paid 1 hour less.
- MentallyRetired 7y agoI've been using sendinblue with good success. This author could have used sendinblue and still been in the free plan if he spaced out his newsletter (max 300 emails a day for free). Even the first paid plan at $25 lets you send 40k a month, which is pretty solid. And they have transactional as well as mailing list support.
- kureikain 7y agoI had a very interesting setup for my news letter[0]. I let Mailchimp handle subscription and unsubscription and deal with spam subscriber, GDPR and the like etc. Then I exported the CSV file and have my script[1] generate email and send it using AWS SES. I paid about $1 per month because my server run outside of AWS. If it were on AWS, then this AWS SES fee will be waived. --- [0] https://betterdev.link https://betterdev.link [1] https://github.com/yeo/betterdev.link/blob/master/baja/fanout.go https://github.com/yeo/betterdev.link/blob/master/baja/fanou...
- sequoia 7y ago> Image, attachment and CSV uploads requires the /uploads/ folder's permission to be set to 777. - https://sendy.co/get-started https://sendy.co/get-started > Step 2 Is this really true? Why do uploaded files need to be executable?
- bijant 7y agoRather than supporting a proprietary product like sendy I would recommend using the far superior civicrm which is fully open source, has a great community around it (not used by marketers and seo-spammer-types but rather by ngo's)and is totally extensible to grow with your needs. It is simple to be GDPR compliant by default and is really easy to get started. It obviously has a far bigger scope but you don't need to take advantage of all that additional functionality. https://civicrm.org/ https://civicrm.org/
- dmje 7y agoMailChimp has gone super crappy. It's not just the pricing (the whole "we charge for subscribers who aren't active" thing is just pure underhand profiteering) but the damn UI is an absolute clusterf* too. Finding anything (forms, automation, even the last email you sent) is just awful. I get the "groovy interface with scribbled cartoon" thing in some instances but dammit sometimes you just need to do stuff easily and quickly rather than being wowed by how clever and groovy a company is being with their design. IMO they've gone from "do one thing well" to "do all the things badly". I've gone from being lifelong MC advocate to someone who is looking for an alternative for our clients. Right now I'm liking MailerLite. It's like MailChimp used to be when it was good.
- hnick 7y agoI agree and we are looking to move. USD$200 per month for ~12k subscribers isn't worth it for us, especially with such poor segmenting and automation features. At least they finally got tags, but you can never add someone to the same automation twice even with years between events that's dead for a lot of use cases. I was really looking forward to trying Drip but they doubled their prices this year so I'm still looking around.
- dave_aiello 7y agoVictor-- you've done the community a service by showing us that There Is More Than One Way To Do It, (TIMTOWTDI) even in the 2019 world of web services. Don't let the nitpickers who don't like affiliate links get you down. Just keep improving your site and providing useful info like this. I'm glad to know somebody who went to Princeton is created such a useful site. I live in the area. Maybe I'll see you at a Meetup sometime.
- whycombagator 7y agoPerhaps it’s gotten better, but sendy for large email lists and campaigns was pretty terrible a few years ago (some lists were > 1m records). Not to mention the delivery rates of SES and overhead of setting up dedicated IPs (if you have that scale). Sendy seemed fine for small workloads, so does SES. The software is decent for the price. But anyone serious about delivery or scale should look beyond Sendy or an SES based tool. There are a whole host of players that are essentially sendy as a SaaS (moonmail, email octopus). From what I’ve heard these are alright. People considering Sendy may wish to look into them I’ve built and used a few products/tools that are backed by sendgrid, SES, and mailgun. Overall, I am a fan of sendgrid but understand it’s not a direct replacement for tools like sendy.
- matty22 7y agoI mean you could also just use any one of the other 500 different ESPs that don't require you to host your own mail server and who have different cost structures than MailChimp, but ok!