I was super excited when this popped up because I'm looking into solutions for this problem right now. I was, however, surprised to see it wasn't self-hosted or

I was super excited when this popped up because I'm looking into solutions for this problem right now. I was, however, surprised to see it wasn't self-hosted or open source. As others have mentioned, there are security issues here that would be a non-starter for me. Even just having to open a database to the open internet for an external service to connect to is too much, even if I trusted that service completely. Self-hosted fixes these issues since outbound traffic can be locked down so only connections to SES are allowed, and no databases have to be exposed to the internet. However, many people will also not want more than 1 service talking directly to a database for a few reasons: 1. Databases are often a single point of failure. A bad query can take down a whole service. Allowing queries that don't pass code review can be dangerous here, even if it's locked down to be read-only. This can be mitigated by talking to replica databases, but that's more setup. 2. Migrations on data that is accessed directly from multiple services becomes harder. Many server frameworks handle data migrations, and they assume ownership of the data. These frameworks cannot account for other services and cannot make sure the queries will continue to work. This is less of an issue if the query is a one-off though. 3. Having multiple services talk directly to a database pushes all the security, data validation and processing to the database. Many developers (myself included) prefer to keep database configuration as simple as possible since they are already complex. Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I thought my experience might be useful in developing this! Generally, I'd love to see a simple, self-hosted MailChimp. Especially one where I could keep all the configuration in version control.