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For 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
by stevehind 5y ago
For 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.
- throwaway3699 5y agoYou could email everyone on Earth for less than the salary of an engineer with SES.
- tashoecraft 5y agoAn engineer should recognize what is worth their time. If setting this up takes more than 5hour a year of time to setup and maintain then it’s not worth it. You’ll be wasting money
- jupp0r 5y agoExactly, engineers should be lazy (seriously).
- Zababa 5y agoNot eveyone earns 100€ an hour, especially in Europe. The newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and in France 45/50k€ a year is a good salary. That's around 14/15€ an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of maintenance.
- tstrimple 5y agoThere are many ways to measure the cost of something like this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business value doesn't make sense. They would be much better utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most engineers could delivery way more than $500 in savings in a week.
- Zababa 5y agoAs I said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27259123 this isn't a company, it's a newsletter so more of something like a side project. I don't think you could deliver more than 500€ of savings in a week because the email costs were the main costs. I agree with you than within a company this would be different, but this isn't a company.
- tashoecraft 5y agoMy comment was targeted to the person I replied to, which I interpreted as "managers only think in terms of time saved where as developers if merely left alone would roll it their own and save time and money", which is ridiculous. An engineer should think like their manager, and the manager should think like the engineer. A cost/benefit should be realized, and I think for the high majority of companies, you should not be rolling your own to save 500/year. A newsletter is so different because merely this blogpost could have generated enough money/attention to warrant doing it, but there's an endless amount of reasoning that can be done to warrant both choices.
- 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.