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Ask HN: Cheaper Alternatives for Landing Page?
I am looking to setup a landing page for a book I'm writing. The goal of the page is mainly to pitch the book, collect emails and direct people to purchase the e-book, the print book when it's available, and to link to my profile on other social media.
I am a backend engineer with very limited frontend skills so I'd prefer to just pay for something that is simple to set up and, ideally, can handle collecting the emails and managing the list (or at least make it easy to integrate with something like MailChimp).
Looking at pricing for starter plans for products that offer this service, I'm surprised to see how expensive they are. Unbounce is $90, SmartPages is $60, etc.
Are there cheaper alternatives? Is my best to do what I can to roll my own, perhaps using a preexisting landing page then and integrating the email capture myself?
I don't want to get too bogged down on setting this up myself as I prefer to focus on writing the book and I'm weary of spending a bunch of time trying to create this myself, only to have it end up not looking very good on account of my weak design and frontend skills.
Any suggestions on the best route to take? Thanks.
- Mmrt00 5y agoTry https://bowwe.com/en/ https://bowwe.com/en/ You can start with a free account, and then if you like switch to the paid (https://bowwe.com/en/pricing https://bowwe.com/en/pricing) Although it’s not cheaper/per year
- xwowsersx 5y agoThank you, will take a look at it.
- warrenm 5y agoI've heard good things about SquareSpace - https://www.squarespace.com/pricing https://www.squarespace.com/pricing You could also just setup a quick-and-dirty WordPress install on a cheap VPS and make a couple static pages for it Shouldn't take more than a few hours
- nivertech 5y agoTry carrd Carrd Pro is $19/year https://carrd.co/ https://carrd.co/ https://carrd.co/pro https://carrd.co/pro
- xwowsersx 5y agoThanks so much. Looks like a great option!
- asicsp 5y agoYou could try Gumroad and use membership for free. Or publish a product saying the ebook will be available later. I use Gumroad to sell my ebooks and membership for a newsletter. Easy to use, don't have to worry about VAT, can email customers, etc.
- xwowsersx 5y agoOh right, I hadn't considered that. Can I use it with my own domain for free?
- asicsp 5y agoI don't have experience with that, but from help pages, seems like you can: https://help.gumroad.com/article/153-setting-up-a-custom-domain https://help.gumroad.com/article/153-setting-up-a-custom-dom...
- patatino 5y agoDorik.com is pretty cheap. I have used it, can recommend it. Not affiliated
- xwowsersx 5y agoLooks like a good option, thanks!