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Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- stevehind 5y agoFor most reasonable applications that is basically a great advertisement for mailchimp, Eg if you rolled your own solution you’d only save eur 500 a year before accounting for the build and maintenance of your solution.
- andybak 5y agoAbsolutely. We have lots of small business clients on a tight budget and this sounds like a bad deal even in that case.
- offtop5 5y agoI had the same reaction too. Why would I go though all this for 500 euro a year. Why doesn't OP deploy this as a service for 15$ a month ?
- katzgrau 5y agoDealing with the spammers and deliverability issues alone is enough to deter me, for one, from the business.
- verdverm 5y agoGiven the recent revelations that MailChimp is fact checking (reading) your email content and deciding whether they should not send it (i.e. the contemporary corporate censorship cause)... there may be more than cost for self hosting business applications https://techstartups.com/2020/10/30/forget-big-tech-censorships-mailchimp-now-going-fact-check-emails/ https://techstartups.com/2020/10/30/forget-big-tech-censorsh...
- throayobviousl 5y agoThis line of reasoning is how to tell the difference between a manager and an engineer :)
- sam_lowry_ 5y agoAnd then, it is not even your own solution, but AWS SES. I have been running mail servers for 20+ years, sending volumes that would have made me multiple times bancrupt if I was doing it via Mailchimp or SES.
- yread 5y agoAWS SES is ~1$/10,000 emails. Are you the biggest spammer or just very very poor? Also, 20 years ago running your email server was way easier than now
- bpodgursky 5y agoAt a previous job, all API errors were emailed to internal email lists. The dev monitoring the API health kept track of system health by looking at the number of unread messages in his inbox. If the number of unread messages went up by < 100,000 in a day, the API was doing fine. If there were a couple million new messages, it means we were having problems. So... I can definitely see how this is plausible, if not uh, "best practice".
- OJFord 5y agoNot to mention the free tier.
- that_guy_iain 5y agoIf you're in the EU you're also saving the GDPR fines. And the author probably saved 500 euros a year on a basic plan. But if you're on the top end plan you would save tens of thousands.
- Silhouette 5y agoWhat GDPR fines are those, specifically?
- ratww 5y agoEDIT: I misread the grandparent post.
- that_guy_iain 5y agoNot FUD there has been a court ruling on using mailchimp being a breach of GDPR.
- ratww 5y agoSorry, I completely misread your post. You're right. My point was actually closer to what you're saying.
- that_guy_iain 5y agoMail chimp stores it’s data in the us and German courts found that it breached GDPR because of US spy laws.
- Silhouette 5y agoWasn't that just the latest iteration of "EU pretends no other country in the world has similar national security laws to its own member states", under which multiple EU-US agreements on data sharing have already been struck down and technically any EU business probably can't use any US-based service ever if that involves sharing of personal data? Did this one get to the end of the process and result in a real fine or other penalty?
- monksy 5y agoAssuming that the newsletter application is a fairly stable release and it's on a package manager or auto updates via docker. The management of that is probably pretty low.
- krrrh 5y agoExcept mailchimp has dumbed it’s interface down so much that maintaining it takes far more time than installing a package like this or paying a small fee for a similar SES backed service like Mail Octopus.
- schappim 5y agoWe pay mailchimp closer to 2,462.74 EUR per year. At this point it is totally worth it.
- hnick 5y agoWe also pay around 200USD/mo and are a small local business with some online presence for e-tutorials etc. They were cheap for a while but if you get over 15k contacts it's a crazy price if you are not a heavily monetised business and mostly just want to send newsletters not conversion funnel jank.
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoHow many of these €50/month does it take to reconsider? €50 for hosting, €50 for email, €50 for tracing, €50 for sentiment analysis, €50 for this, €50 for that. By the time you realise, you are burning €6k a year on stuff that takes hours to roll out yourself.
- jrochkind1 5y agoYou are suggesting rolling out all of those things yourself will take only a one-time investment of "hours" (meaning fewer than 10?), with no ongoing maintenance? I think at minimum "hours" per month seems more realistic, no?
- nickjj 5y agoMaintenance isn't too bad IMO. I've been running Sendy for a while on my own host. I spend about 30 minutes a year on maintenance time to occasionally upgrade versions. Each upgrade takes about 10 minutes and I tend do it every few months.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- manquer 5y agoShoutout to postal [1] , for outbound email delivery for apps and smaller well maintained mailing, the likes of SES/Sendgrid can be also be removed from the stack. While email delivery is complex, and reputation matters, for smaller apps and well established mailing lists, self setup works perfectly fine. [1] https://github.com/postalhq/postal https://github.com/postalhq/postal
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 5y ago500€ is 5 hours of labor. If you are skilled and everything works right away you may only spend 2 hours on the self-maintained solution which means you save 3 hours or in other words … nothing. You also have to maintain/update the system, maybe spend time teaching other people. It’s not worth the effort. If you don’t have expert knowledge in the required tools/services, it will take much longer than 5 hours to set up the self-maintained solution. If you are unlucky “you may need the help of a professional sysadmin.” … Again, saving nothing.
- paulcole 5y ago> 500€ is 5 hours of labor Only if someone will pay you for those 5 hours. Otherwise may as well say they’re worth 37 starfish or 92 leprechauns.
- tiborsaas 5y agoWell, if you don't have anything better to do, got the time and have a DIY attitude, then it's a great investment. Also, there are more years to come so Y+1 it still saves you 500.
- Zababa 5y ago> 500€ is 5 hours of labor. It's not, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259000. > You also have to maintain/update the system, maybe spend time teaching other people. I think it's just one person running a newletter, so I don't think teaching other people is a thing here.
- bifrost 5y agoThis doesn't sound like a good deal for the average business with zero experiencing managing their mail. One spam block and you're done, you'll spend at least a week dealing with that.
- mceachen 5y agoThis calculus makes sense, unless what you're moving away from has no functional delivery assurances and regularly has server errors and downtime. And customer service that denies their own problems.
- bifrost 5y agoIndeed true, if you are on one of those big providers and they're failing you there's not much to lose aside from your own time/money by DIY'ing it. The ESP business is basically all about volume and if you need special handling you're going to get left behind.
- PurpleFoxy 5y agoHonestly everyone could spam block mailchimp and their email experience would improve.
- davnicwil 5y agoI know that one of the very hard problems with automating email is not landing in the spam folder. I always had the impression that using services like Mailchimp make that much less likely than doing it DIY on top of a more commodity transport like SES. I.e. they stay on top of and evolve with best practices over time so you don't have to. Is that in any way accurate?
- cosmodisk 5y agoI used to use Pardot ( B2B marketing software) at work, which is miles ahead of MailChimp. While there are certain things you can't do by default (e.g. email to info@domain.com,etc) , the spam filters are still kind of blackbox,so the content can have a huge play in addition to marketing software server's reputation,etc.
- mythz 5y agoNot in our experience, we've only used SES to send emails and haven't had any reports of Customers not receiving emails or any of our emails having ended up in their spam folder, although we've never sent any marketing or promotional emails so our flagged rates should be really low.
- jcrawfordor 5y agoI moved my mailing list (all explicit subscribes, plaintext content) from Mailchimp to an SES-based solution in part for better handling of plaintext email, which is a total afterthought for most of these tools. Since the switch I have experienced minor hard rejection problems with SES that I didn't before, primarily with Apple Mail and rarely with gmail as well. I wouldn't say it's been a huge problem for me, in part because I don't care that much, but as far as I can tell Apple Mail was rejecting 100% of what I sent for a while while gmail just sporadically randomly rejects an email from time to time, not even the same email across multiple recipients.
- cosmodisk 5y ago"primarily with Apple Mail" We started having this recently when sending quotations to customers. We ended up sending attached PDFs instead,so Apple Mail won't complain anymore. It can be either content or how the domain is setup,still not sure to this day.
- bdcravens 5y agoThe server you run node/MySQL/nginx on isn't free.
- ex_amazon_sde 5y agoTo send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. The real advantage is to have control over your own infrastructure and ensure the privacy of your reader base. The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address.
- ghaff 5y ago>The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address. Which sound like big drawbacks for anything reasonably serious. Maybe if you're doing this at scale for clients but, then, you're potentially exposed to clients who can cause problems that affect other clients.
- sneak 5y agoDeliverability is a thing. When most of your list recipients are on gmail, this is a good way to end up in spam for all of them. People who believe this is a viable method to reach the inboxes of thousands of gmail users have never tried.
- Silhouette 5y agoSadly, this says more about how broken GMail now is than anything else. Real Soon Now(TM), the tech community needs to start a serious campaign to shame and isolate email providers that do not reliably deliver legitimate emails, regardless of how high profile they are. It probably needs meaningful government/regulator backing to get anywhere. The odd false positive on spam/malware filtering is understandable, it's not a perfect science, but the reality today is that a lot of these services simply don't work properly and the unreliability is probably causing some degree of damage to huge numbers of people and businesses. Email is far too important for far too many things to let the reliability continue to degrade according to the arbitrary whims of a few large mail services and to permit oligopoly effects to lock new or small-time providers out of the system almost entirely.
- sneak 5y ago“the tech community” doesn’t matter: users chose gmail. Shaming them won’t do anything, because the users are the ones whose choices matter.
- antoineaugusti 5y agoIf you're ready to pay 5$ each month for each thousand subscribers, Buttondown seems like a great tool. It does offert paid subscriptions as well if you want to earn money with your content. https://buttondown.email https://buttondown.email
- chiefalchemist 5y agoIntriguing. But run by one person? That's not worth the risk.
- nickjj 5y ago> But run by one person? That's not worth the risk. I have no affiliation with them but I did speak to the guy who runs Buttondown on my podcast. He went over how it's built and deployed at: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/70-buttondown-lets-you-build-grow-and-launch-your-email-newsletter https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/70-buttondown-lets-y... He has clients with over 100k+ people on their list and has put in a lot of thought and leg work to ensure good deliverability rates. It's also been running for ~5 years.
- atonse 5y agoIs there an open source server that gives you all the goodies that MailGun abd SendGrid do? Like delivery abd bounce webhooks?
- degenerate 5y agoI don't think there is. NodeMailer kind of gets close by letting you request Delivery Status Notifications, but doesn't have webhooks or handle them for you: https://nodemailer.com/smtp/dsn/ https://nodemailer.com/smtp/dsn/ The closest thing I think exists would be Sendy, but it's a closed source paid app.
- koheripbal 5y agoIt's not closed source - the source is visible when you install it.
- mgbmtl 5y agoCiviCRM can handle bounces (fetches them from a mailbox using a VERP), but for spam complaints, you need to own your IP block in order to manage feedback loops, which is another level of complicated.
- jgalt212 5y agoI cannot speak for Mailchimp, but open and click report in a Constant Contact seems to be persistently broken. e.g. email security software driven opens and clicks are registered as human by CC's reporting tools (GUI and API).
- bombcar 5y agoI’ve never seen open and click reports worth anything beyond comparing to each other (eg email X got 5% and email Y shows 6%).
- Zealotux 5y agoI've been working on my own startup for a few months now, I'd say email is one of these things where I really don't mind paying for, even though I hate how expensive Mailchimp/Mandrill is.
- cosmodisk 5y agoThis article is a good example of why MailChimp isn't going anywhere anytime soon. One-to-many email solutions are crazy: it's either some crap or super expensive marketing software. We all wish there was something a bit better.
- izgzhen 5y agoSpeaking from personal experiences on non-dedicated IP plans on both SendGrid and SES, SES is much better in deliverability of transactional emails, esp. when sent to .edu domains. I felt like SES is more careful in vetting their customers to prevent shared IPs being polluted.
- bombcar 5y agoI feel administrators for EDUs (for example) know how to easily block all of sendgrid or mailchimp but don’t know how to block all of SES without blocking the Dean’s Amazon receipts.
- izgzhen 5y agoFWIW EDUs typically use an external service like https://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl https://www.barracudacentral.org/rbl
- mtlynch 5y agoIf you don't want to pay MailChimp prices but don't want to make the full leap to self-hosting, EmailOctopus Connect is a nice middle ground.[0] It's similar to Mailtrain in that it uses your Amazon SES account to send the mail, but it's a managed SaaS so you don't have to worry about keeping your server patched or accidentally wiping out your subscriber list. I've been migrating all my lists out of MailChimp and into EmailOctopus over the past six months, and I've been happy with the service. One nice perk is that you can disable view and click tracking, giving back some privacy to your subscribers. Their API is also the nicest of any providers I looked at. [0] https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect https://emailoctopus.com/pricing-connect
- dariusj18 5y agoTheir cookie acceptance popup is a UX trap
- windsignaling 5y agoFor those saying that this is a complicated solution: it is. I started using Sendy with SES a few years ago and it was much easier to setup compared to this blog post. Went from $120 / mo to pennies, + the initial cost of Sendy. If you're a developer, it's worth it.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoIs there anything similar that does not use Amazon?
- _stefanzweifel 5y agoMailcoach [1] is another self-hosted email marketing tool. It isn't tied to SES and can be used with Postmark, Sendgrid or any other SMTP server. Initial price is much higher than Sendy, but Mailchimp recently also added a drip campaigns feature. [1]: https://mailcoach.app https://mailcoach.app
- Karishma1234fff 5y agoI have seen far too many articles of these types. As someone who has sent billions of emails I can tell you the following. 1. SES is shit. 2. Value of mailchimp is not in its interface. It is in mail deliverability. Use at least sendgrid.
- Braxton_Hicks 5y agoCan you elaborate on why SES is shit? I've been using it for about 6 months now to run a small newsletter and haven't experienced any issues with deliverability.
- bombcar 5y agoSES requires you to know what you’re doing with setup, etc - mailchimp et al hand-hold you through all that.
- Braxton_Hicks 5y agoBut if you do know what you're doing - like myself and many other engineers - you don't need hand holding. I would not consider SES "shit" because it does not baby-sit you throughout the setup process. The documentation was solid, and I had a lot of freedom to customize a solution specific to my use case. Overall working SES has been an enjoyable experience. But maybe my mind will change 1 billion emails later haha we'll see.
- bombcar 5y agoI agree. When testing the various SES was more involved but seemed to work fine. If you follow the standard procedures and aren’t a spammer (even a respectable spammer) it should work fine.
- Karishma1234fff 5y agoWe sent few million emails using SES over few weeks, Sendgrid's deliverability was around 12 times better than that of SES. Don't get me wrong, it might be perfectly fine choice for smaller projects but it is not a solution you would rely for scale. You have to build your own mailservers with warmed up IPs.
- hnick 5y agoCan anyone with experience compare Mailtrain / Mautic / others? I did a quick Mautic setup on a DO droplet a while back. It felt a little like beta software, a lot of careful steps to get things working, some things didn't work, updates and some actions on a clean install gave me PHP errors, Amazon SES API wasn't built yet so sent super slow via SMTP only, etc. And it leaned way harder into marketing automation as I should've expected from the name (JS on page to track users then associate them if/when they sign up later). This was at least a year ago and they've had a major release since so might have fixed some of these but I'm still trying to save money for a small business who can't afford $200/mo for sporadic newsletters and welcome series with free stuff.
- katzgrau 5y agoClearly OP's newsletter is a labor of love without much earning potential (or not much effort in that regard), otherwise delegating email delivery to a service like MailChimp is the wisest move. If you're a hacker trying to launch a business, building your own email service to save $50/month is a ridiculous distraction from getting to profitability.
- tjbiddle 5y agoAgreed. I spend over $1,000/mo on various software for my business. Occasionally I'll trim the fat, but saving a few bucks here and there isn't worth it when energy spent elsewhere makes far more.
- knadh 5y agoI wrote listmonk[1] after running into difficulties scaling existing open source list managers including Mailtrain to millions of subscribers. It is a single binary app that can run on a potato VM instance. [1] https://listmonk.app https://listmonk.app
- plasma 5y agoThat’s really nice looking!
- joshmn 5y agoFor folks looking for a Rails engine that doesn’t ship with a GUI, I built Caffeinate to manage/create/send scheduled email sequences/drip campaigns: https://caffeinate.email https://caffeinate.email It could also be used for creating and managing a newsletter, but doing so is undocumented as of writing.
- Steve2505 5y agoThe problem I find quite often with a lot of these tools is that whilst it's using AWS SES to do the sending it can be a bit cumbersome or sometimes not at all possible to see which of your emails are being delivered, which are bouncing etc. There's some cool options out there like sesmonitor.com and sesdashboard.com which add that extra layer