7 ms·

Show HN: I made an open source Mailchimp RSS-to-Email alternative

109 points by elliotkillick 2y ago

Hi all! Excited to share rss2newsletter after completing dev work for the initial release. The idea for this project came out of necessity, as I wanted to share my articles via email newsletter. I was looking for a super minimal, lightweight, and open source solution, and when none existed, I decided to create one. For any sizable number of email recipients, a popular platform like Mailchimp will easily cost you hundreds or even thousands per month in per-contact fees. rss2newsletter, on the other hand, allows you to use Amazon SES, so you can reach your audience at pennies on the dollar. Beyond these factors, I also wanted something that could run on an internet-connected potato it's so easy on your system and fully automated so you can set it and forget it. So, I created (and put under a free software license): https://github.com/ElliotKillick/rss2newsletter https://github.com/ElliotKillick/rss2newsletter rss2newsletter (integrating with Listmonk and Amazon SES for ultra-low-cost emails) is a drop-in solution that requires almost no setup besides connecting with SES and styling your emails. It's also competitive at what it does with proprietary self-hosted solutions like Sendy, which requires your system/VPS to have some rather beefy specs to run well. Let me know if there are any other features you would like to see. I hope you can find my project helpful to you!

browningstreet 2y ago
I was surprised, coming back to newsletters, how many newsletter platforms don't support RSS-to-newsletter. I've hacked a work-around that I'm not happy with, but I look forward to digging into this.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  A lot of devs and PMs under age 30 have never heard of RSS, or if they have it's not something they ever used, and not top-of-mind when it comes to features.
  - browningstreet 2y ago
    Maybe, but another thought I had while scanning newsletter services is that they haven't really evolved or changed in many years. Substack would suggest email isn't quite dead, but email feels at-risk. That said, I support both newsletters and Substack but I do a lot of manual copy-and-pasting. I also had to hand-code my own Wordpress newsletter content script to generate something that could then be cross-deployed to newsletters. None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
    - iamacyborg 2y ago
      > None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development. From my viewpoint, most of the development in email tools over the last decade has been in the data processing realm. ie, collecting data or improving the quantity and quality of integrations and then allowing newsletter senders to segment and personalise emails based on that. The more advanced tools allow for proper templating languages and ML based data models such as RFM, recommendation systems, etc. Newsletters feel like a mostly solved problem with very little further product development required, from where I'm seeing things.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  I don't think it's that surprising, really. Email doesn't support the general markup you can often expect to see in a blog post and email to rss tools to date haven't offered good means of filtering the output to tidy that up, specifically with things like inlining styles which remains important. Folks who care about sending good emails quickly realised that the tools just aren't good enough so have resorted to sending the emails separately. There are obviously other factors at play but that was a big one for me when I looked at the tooling a decade ago when I used SFMC (which offered email to rss functionality).
pacifika 2y ago
Just what I was looking for. Thanks!
- elliotkillick 2y ago
  My pleasure!
  - pacifika 2y ago
    I built a simple self hosting micro blogging platform which can also ingests rss feeds and turn them into posts (lamb — it’s in alpha) so that could produce a master feed and hook nicely into this.
    - elliotkillick 2y ago
      For sure, converting feeds into emails in that direction is something I've seen as a sticking point for a lot of projects. I'm glad I could fill that gap for you.
qudat 2y ago
Very cool! We built something similar but is not self hosted: https://pico.sh/feeds https://pico.sh/feeds How do you handle Reddit feeds? We found those to be tricky to get right because it seems like Reddit doesn’t want you to use rss
- elliotkillick 2y ago
  Oh, nice! I recall Reddit did support RSS at one point, I didn't realize they limited it. rss2newsletter is only ~300 lines of code right now and I'd prefer to keep it more on the minimal side of things. But, that's definitely a cool feature to have.
CPLX 2y ago
This is great and very happy to see it. Mailchimp is annoyingly expensive for what it is. With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part. Deliverability is hard. Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders or worse. Granted if it’s 100% opt-in and you have the kind of audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you’ll probably improve and be ok long term but it’s something to think about.
- elliotkillick 2y ago
  Thanks! In my personal experience, I've had success delivering to the inboxes of Gmail, Outlook, and Zoho Mail with SES. However, my newsletter is entirely opt-in on my website. When I signed up for SES, there was a human review as to what I would be sending. So, I think Amazon understands spam is an issue, too. Listmonk supports many email providers though, if your needs outgrow SES.
- shortformblog 2y ago
  I’ve used SES for nearly a decade. It’s fine if you stick with it.
hardwaresofton 2y ago
Listmonk is a seriously awesome piece of software! Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API. https://listmonk.app https://listmonk.app
shortformblog 2y ago
This is cool—happy to see more stuff like this. I like the idea of creating a private RSS feed with a CMS and having it ship out to a service like this automagically.
santa_boy 2y ago
Perhaps a bit OT, but will really appreciate inputs on this. There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability. What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES. Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?
- elliotkillick 2y ago
  Email deliverability is no secret. Just send an email to one of many email deliverability testers to find out the spammyness of your email: https://www.mail-tester.com https://www.mail-tester.com The sender IP address is a large component in determining email spammyness. This is why SES allows you to pay extra for a dedicated IP address (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html). However, it's not something you will likely need unless you send in large volumes.
  - martinkrivosija 2y ago
    It's definitely no secret but those testers do not provide the full story. No do IP blocklist checkers - not all blocklists are created equal, nor do most have any impact at all. For most senders, whilst IP reputation does play a role, as long as you're on a decent platform the majority of your deliverability concerns will be surrounding your own domain's reputation. Your domain reputation is directly influenced by your sending behaviour. You need to be sending to people who want to receive your email and will engage with it. iamacyborg's response above is spot on.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  > What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES. Email deliverability is reputation based (beyond IP) and takes into account technical, reputational and behavioural factors. Technical basically means getting stuff like SPF, DKIM and DMARC right. Reputational means you’re sending from a reputable IP and that the domain you’re sending from is reputable. If you’re too small to warrant your own IP, you need to be on a shared one with other good senders. Behavioural just means that your recipients are engaging with your emails in a manner that the inbox provider deems to be positive. Some of this stuff is a bit challenging to setup, or it’s a bit tough to build the reputation, there’s no real secret sauce to it though.
Beijinger 2y ago
I prefer it the other way around: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/
- willwade 2y ago
  nice. feedbin also do this https://feedbin.com https://feedbin.com
  - benoliver999 2y ago
    And iirc Newsblur I use it all the time on feedbin
- davidchua 2y ago
  I've built a similar app before I found out about this. https://newsletters.love https://newsletters.love If anyone wants to give it a try, please give me your feedback!
  - RamblingCTO 2y ago
    it looks a bit unfinished tbh and is pretty slow. HN success hug of death? I built something similar: https://newsletterify.com https://newsletterify.com but is also not really finished. There's a copy cat of my product of which I'm not sharing the link, but I love that there is some competition out there. I love reading newsletters and aggregated information when I have the time, but emails aren't really the medium imho
    - latexr 2y ago
      For those clicking, in contrast to the other options this one is paid. Most basic package is $3.99/month or $39.99/year.
      - RamblingCTO 2y ago
        Yup, and the prices will change, I just haven't gotten to that part yet. I did a bigger rewrite that I had to do first (moved backend to supabase, introduced pagination everywhere). New pricing will be up asap and will be around $6.99/$69.99 for a lite version (small number of summaries) and $9.99/$9.99 for the regular plan. Will include 7+ days of free trial. That's almost half of the copy cat btw. If anyone's interested, I can get in touch after I updated the pricing

109 points by elliotkillick 2y ago

browningstreet 2y ago

I was surprised, coming back to newsletters, how many newsletter platforms don't support RSS-to-newsletter. I've hacked a work-around that I'm not happy with, but I look forward to digging into this.

SoftTalker 2y ago
A lot of devs and PMs under age 30 have never heard of RSS, or if they have it's not something they ever used, and not top-of-mind when it comes to features.
- browningstreet 2y ago
  Maybe, but another thought I had while scanning newsletter services is that they haven't really evolved or changed in many years. Substack would suggest email isn't quite dead, but email feels at-risk. That said, I support both newsletters and Substack but I do a lot of manual copy-and-pasting. I also had to hand-code my own Wordpress newsletter content script to generate something that could then be cross-deployed to newsletters. None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    > None of it feels like an ecosystem.. it feels like feature sets that atrophied about 10 years ago, and lack any ongoing creativity or innovation or product development. From my viewpoint, most of the development in email tools over the last decade has been in the data processing realm. ie, collecting data or improving the quantity and quality of integrations and then allowing newsletter senders to segment and personalise emails based on that. The more advanced tools allow for proper templating languages and ML based data models such as RFM, recommendation systems, etc. Newsletters feel like a mostly solved problem with very little further product development required, from where I'm seeing things.
iamacyborg 2y ago
I don't think it's that surprising, really. Email doesn't support the general markup you can often expect to see in a blog post and email to rss tools to date haven't offered good means of filtering the output to tidy that up, specifically with things like inlining styles which remains important. Folks who care about sending good emails quickly realised that the tools just aren't good enough so have resorted to sending the emails separately. There are obviously other factors at play but that was a big one for me when I looked at the tooling a decade ago when I used SFMC (which offered email to rss functionality).

pacifika 2y ago

Just what I was looking for. Thanks!

elliotkillick 2y ago
My pleasure!
- pacifika 2y ago
  I built a simple self hosting micro blogging platform which can also ingests rss feeds and turn them into posts (lamb — it’s in alpha) so that could produce a master feed and hook nicely into this.
  - elliotkillick 2y ago
    For sure, converting feeds into emails in that direction is something I've seen as a sticking point for a lot of projects. I'm glad I could fill that gap for you.

qudat 2y ago

Very cool! We built something similar but is not self hosted: https://pico.sh/feeds https://pico.sh/feeds How do you handle Reddit feeds? We found those to be tricky to get right because it seems like Reddit doesn’t want you to use rss

elliotkillick 2y ago
Oh, nice! I recall Reddit did support RSS at one point, I didn't realize they limited it. rss2newsletter is only ~300 lines of code right now and I'd prefer to keep it more on the minimal side of things. But, that's definitely a cool feature to have.

CPLX 2y ago

This is great and very happy to see it. Mailchimp is annoyingly expensive for what it is. With that said the sending of the emails is the easy part. Deliverability is hard. Sending via SES is pretty likely to go straight to spam folders or worse. Granted if it’s 100% opt-in and you have the kind of audience that will hunt for the email and mark it as valid you’ll probably improve and be ok long term but it’s something to think about.

elliotkillick 2y ago
Thanks! In my personal experience, I've had success delivering to the inboxes of Gmail, Outlook, and Zoho Mail with SES. However, my newsletter is entirely opt-in on my website. When I signed up for SES, there was a human review as to what I would be sending. So, I think Amazon understands spam is an issue, too. Listmonk supports many email providers though, if your needs outgrow SES.
shortformblog 2y ago
I’ve used SES for nearly a decade. It’s fine if you stick with it.

hardwaresofton 2y ago

Listmonk is a seriously awesome piece of software! Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API. https://listmonk.app https://listmonk.app

shortformblog 2y ago

This is cool—happy to see more stuff like this. I like the idea of creating a private RSS feed with a CMS and having it ship out to a service like this automagically.

santa_boy 2y ago

Perhaps a bit OT, but will really appreciate inputs on this. There have been an influx of such tools, and understandably so, related to email lists. Based on various comments, I feel that the biggest item driving success around email is around email deliverability. What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES. Any email gurus to please throw actionable light on this?

elliotkillick 2y ago
Email deliverability is no secret. Just send an email to one of many email deliverability testers to find out the spammyness of your email: https://www.mail-tester.com https://www.mail-tester.com The sender IP address is a large component in determining email spammyness. This is why SES allows you to pay extra for a dedicated IP address (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/dg/dedicated-ip.html). However, it's not something you will likely need unless you send in large volumes.
- martinkrivosija 2y ago
  It's definitely no secret but those testers do not provide the full story. No do IP blocklist checkers - not all blocklists are created equal, nor do most have any impact at all. For most senders, whilst IP reputation does play a role, as long as you're on a decent platform the majority of your deliverability concerns will be surrounding your own domain's reputation. Your domain reputation is directly influenced by your sending behaviour. You need to be sending to people who want to receive your email and will engage with it. iamacyborg's response above is spot on.
iamacyborg 2y ago
> What are the the skills and secret sauce of companies that claim to do very reliable email deliverability, and I'm failing to understand why isn't it as simple as doing the right configurations and setting it up using Amazon SES. Email deliverability is reputation based (beyond IP) and takes into account technical, reputational and behavioural factors. Technical basically means getting stuff like SPF, DKIM and DMARC right. Reputational means you’re sending from a reputable IP and that the domain you’re sending from is reputable. If you’re too small to warrant your own IP, you need to be on a shared one with other good senders. Behavioural just means that your recipients are engaging with your emails in a manner that the inbox provider deems to be positive. Some of this stuff is a bit challenging to setup, or it’s a bit tough to build the reputation, there’s no real secret sauce to it though.

Beijinger 2y ago

I prefer it the other way around: https://kill-the-newsletter.com/ https://kill-the-newsletter.com/

willwade 2y ago
nice. feedbin also do this https://feedbin.com https://feedbin.com
- benoliver999 2y ago
  And iirc Newsblur I use it all the time on feedbin
davidchua 2y ago
I've built a similar app before I found out about this. https://newsletters.love https://newsletters.love If anyone wants to give it a try, please give me your feedback!
- RamblingCTO 2y ago
  it looks a bit unfinished tbh and is pretty slow. HN success hug of death? I built something similar: https://newsletterify.com https://newsletterify.com but is also not really finished. There's a copy cat of my product of which I'm not sharing the link, but I love that there is some competition out there. I love reading newsletters and aggregated information when I have the time, but emails aren't really the medium imho
  - latexr 2y ago
    For those clicking, in contrast to the other options this one is paid. Most basic package is $3.99/month or $39.99/year.
    - RamblingCTO 2y ago
      Yup, and the prices will change, I just haven't gotten to that part yet. I did a bigger rewrite that I had to do first (moved backend to supabase, introduced pagination everywhere). New pricing will be up asap and will be around $6.99/$69.99 for a lite version (small number of summaries) and $9.99/$9.99 for the regular plan. Will include 7+ days of free trial. That's almost half of the copy cat btw. If anyone's interested, I can get in touch after I updated the pricing