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I tried every top email marketing tool

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coreyh14444 2y ago
I love the idea of a breakdown like this, but so many of the author's deal-killers are not relevant for most startups (the audience here). This is more of a list of solo freelancers.
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  That’s fair. Any specifics?
  - steve-benjamins 2y ago
    Just to add this wasn’t written from the perspective of a solo freelancer. I’m part a 4-person startup (Atlist.com)
greedylizard 2y ago
This is very relevant to my industry (escape rooms). Our mailing lists quickly reach 10,000+ and unsubscribes happen often. I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.
- Hizonner 2y ago
  > Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Presumably it would also have lost your record of the fact that they'd already asked to not get your email. So you'd have added them back to the spam list if they ever dealt with you again, so they'd have to unsubscribe again. Spam has gotten so normalized that not only are people not even pretending to get opt-ins, but they don't see why they should have to pay any real attention to opt-outs. Yes, you are a spammer, and so are most of the businesses on the Internet at this point.
- kyleee 2y ago
  You can archive users when they unsub to avoid them counting towards your billable total
  - steve-benjamins 2y ago
    Do you have to manually do this or can it be automated?
    - kyleee 2y ago
      It can be done via the api
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      Manual afaict.
gmays 2y ago
Good analysis. One correction though, EmailOctopus does offer auto-plan downgrades. Screenshot of the billing page on our account: https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan). I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew. But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company). [1] https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctopus-connect https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctop...
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  Great point. Thanks for sharing. (I originally considered it “not automated” because it wasn’t on by default but that’s a bit harsh in hindsight. )
- jonathanbull 2y ago
  CEO of EmailOctopus here. I was just about to offer this clarification, so thanks for commenting! Confirming that we offer auto-plan downgrades (and if you prefer it to not be automatic, as a lot of people do, you can manually increase/decrease your tier at any time).
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    I have a free account with you guys and your customer support has been top-notch, so thank you.
Terretta 2y ago
In the "you had one job" category of things to look at from an email marketing tool: What about email deliverability? Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes. The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly. This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  I disagree. It’s a dimension of the decision, certainly not the “one thing” to look for. … unless you’re a spammer haha.
  - Terretta 2y ago
    Or unless your emails matter to your customers, with you seeing them as individual names instead of spray and pray marketing. Deliverability is the single most important thing to reach individuals in the first place, even more critical to maintain the transactional or workflow email relationship. Anthropic right now has an issue where their "passwordless" emails go to junk for M365 customers (85% of SMBs in U.S.), people literally can't use the service since the email isn't delivered to the inbox. To your point, in a past gig helping thousands of businesses with turning contacts into not just buyers but fans, I discovered mass marketers don't really care about deliverability at the level of "every single communication must land with every person". At the same time, I learned customers you want to build a relationship with very much do care. Ever since, when evaluating these, I start there, even before price. How many communications, transactions, or workflows with a future buyer with intent are you willing to fail to connect? "You had one job" means the primary, not only, dimension. Yes, the primary job of a mailer is for the mail to get there. I agree there's lots more to look for as well!
    - Hizonner 2y ago
      That ("Anthropic's" deliverability issue) is a Microsoft issue. Don't normalize Microsoft's bad practices.
yanko 2y ago
You did not evaluate adobe marketo.
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  True! Have you tried it? Any thoughts?
  - layer8 2y ago
    Your main headline claims you tried every email marketing tool. (“Top” is only in the HN title, and even then I don’t know if Adobe Marketo doesn’t qualify as “top”.)
    - portaouflop 2y ago
      Every “top” marketing tool. Obviously it’s not possible to try all tools, there are probably thousands. “Top” is a subjective category so OP just evaluated most relevant tools probably.
      - layer8 2y ago
        As I already tried to point out, “top” is only in the HN title, not in the actual article title.
    - jeffgreco 2y ago
      Wow you're telling me he didn't try every one of 12,000 marketing tools that exist?
      - layer8 2y ago
        I’m telling you he’s being criticized for the hyperbole.
kweks 2y ago
Adding our recent experience with Klaviyo. Klaviyo charges by "profile". When paired with Shopify, it automatically imports / pulls customer information 5o it's servers even when the customer specifically opted out of marketing. First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us. Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded. They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.
- frereubu 2y ago
  That explains why that box hasn't worked when I've used Shopify stores before. I couldn't be bothered to take them to task individually, but I figured they were using some kind of crappy "legitimate interest" basis.
- iammrpayments 2y ago
  I don’t remember how, but you can lock in a lower tier plan and they will stop sending emails for the month once you hit that thresold. I have a small store that uses the free tier like this for automatic emails and when we need to send promotional emails we just use Shopify native email app which is 100x cheaper than klaviyo
simple10 2y ago
There's one tool worth mentioning that was missing from the list: High Level. It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP. If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot. https://gohighlevel.com/ https://gohighlevel.com/ For additional context, I've switched all my businesses and clients out of Mailchimp and Klaviyo to High Level.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  I used HighLevel for 2 years and have gone to the HL Summit. HighLevel is good, but it's a Zoho-burger: A mish-mashed suite of features, products, and toolset that each deliver a 6-7/10 rating on their own, with the promise of convenience by having those feature suites in 1 place. For those using HighLevel, they're usually saving up to use HubSpot for their clients as an agency or freelance marketer - as I did. HighLevel is just a budgetary HubSpot.
mtlynch 2y ago
I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended. Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most. And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program. The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons. [0] https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...
- thih9 2y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program. Do we know if that is the case?
  - reddalo 2y ago
    Curiously, all the "best" apps have an affiliate link, and all the "rest" don't. Draw your own conclusions.
    - animex 2y ago
      coughwirecuttercough
    - steve-benjamins 2y ago
      Op here. That’s not even true! Loops is in “the best” and if doesnt have an affiliate link. All “the rest” have affiliate programs too… I was just lazy to sign up for them. Not everything is a conspiracy. The reality in this case is more mundane.
chevman 2y ago
A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing. Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.
binarymax 2y ago
s/email marketing/spam/ Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.
- ghaff 2y ago
  There are degrees of everything. Good luck with "If you build it they will come." Lots of people here hate advertising of any form as well. You need to promote things in some form in almost all cases.
  - manishsharan 2y ago
    I use it to help drive engagement with the product for paying subscribers to introduce features that they have not used and invite them to training webinars.
araes 2y ago
Bachman has relevant commentary on marketing and companies like MailChimp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8
simple10 2y ago
Great article. Thanks for writing it all up. A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability. With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability. For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab. 1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly 2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent. 3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox. 4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly. 5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.
- Narciss 2y ago
  Really good advice, thanks for this! Will be looking to do this for a new side project that I have going on and this helps to know what to look out for
- rwmj 2y ago
  > A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability. How about never. Is never good for you?
- technion 2y ago
  It's not an issue of being too hard to understand. The moment I say "double opt in", marketing will decide I lack the skills to be involved in mail and deliverability will be placed in the hands of someone with a graphics design background that has never heard of dns. I've seen it in every single place I've tried to help marketing campaigns for over 20 years.
locallost 2y ago
If Brevo is one of the best, I am sceptical. I've had he displeasure of using it this year and the tools they offer are very iffy. But even ignoring that, the service is often down. I was often trying to edit a template, but it would not work because you keep getting a message like "something went wrong" and nothing gets displayed.
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  Can you be specific about “iffy”? I’d be curious to know more.
  - locallost 2y ago
    You can build kind of blocks that you use, but for anything more complex you're pretty much forced to use a kind of free HTML field, which of course is just a text field where you either suffer by editing html and their templating system in a browser text field (the templating is something Django compatible) or you copy and paste from your text editor which is also a form of torture. I've edited the wrong template on occasion, and saved it. Even if you just stick to their wysiwyg you still have to sometimes add conditional blocks and this also is for me anyway difficult. They have developer mode too, which is your email as a giant yaml. So they support a bunch of things, but personally I would not use it for anything except simple marketing campaigns. We do use it for that, but someone had the idea of having all customer emails go through it, and I don't really like it.
ctippett 2y ago
I don't have a horse in this race, but I came across Postmark[1] several years ago and thought to myself if I ever needed to send marketing emails — or transactional for that matter — I'd give them my business. They seem.. nice. Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them? [1] https://www.postmarkapp.com https://www.postmarkapp.com
- mtlynch 2y ago
  Postmark is owned by Active Campaign, which was included in OPs list, though I'm not sure how the Postmark product differs from the original Active Campaign product. I've been using Postmark for hobby projects for the past three years, and I've been happy with them, but my needs are super minimal - just sending out <100 emails per month programmatically where latency doesn't matter.
  - cess11 2y ago
    A previous employer used Postmark around the time they got acquired, I recommended they find another supplier but left sometime after. Back then they were rather convenient and we didn't have any problems with tainted IP addresses, not sure if their new rather villainous owner has changed the Postmark business. I kind of expect them to pull IP addresses in through the email sending business to build reputation and then promote them to the ad delivery business.
JamesSwift 2y ago
The article is “I tried every top email marketing tool” and starts with eliminating a majority of the field based on an arbitrary rubric of what the author specifically is looking for. Then fails to compare essentially anything about the tools to provide any semblance of a useful review for any other person to consume for their own research. I have to agree with the other poster that this really just seems to be a reasonable attempt to get affiliate link click throughs.
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  OP here. What would you compare the tools on? Be specific
  - bitwarrior 2y ago
    I think the issue here is with the word "tried" and what that communicates. I think "compared" would be far more appropriate.
    - steve-benjamins 2y ago
      That’s fair! I actually “tried” more than the “elite 6” but I eliminated many of those tools for different reasons
  - JamesSwift 2y ago
    Deliverability, price, pricing model, api/automation, UI, email builders, support, etc. The article is just “why we chose breva” and is very specific to you. As far as I can tell you didnt even use half of the offerings since they were ruled out purely due to pricing models. EDIT: just an example. If I wanted to know about sendgrid and how it compares, the only information this page gives me is “it has an overage charge”. How am I supposed to consume this article as an informative comparison?
    - steve-benjamins 2y ago
      … We didn’t choose Brevo. You didn’t even read the article!
malisper 2y ago
It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are: - Customer.io - Iterable - Braze - Marketo - Salesforce Marketing Cloud My understanding is Customer.io is what most startups use these days with larger companies using one of the other four.
- fijiaarone 2y ago
  $100/month for less than most mail providers offer free, and $1000/month for standard features is only for startups trying to burn money before they get off the runway.
- AlexeyMK 2y ago
  That is mostly right, with the caveat that customer.io is trying to go upmarket too now. https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/picking-your-lifecycle-marketing https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/picking-your-lif... I wrote this up about a year ago for a more comprehensive perspective for companies series A+
pentacent_hq 2y ago
Interesting point about charging for unsubscribed contacts! I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers. I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!
- fijiaarone 2y ago
  I haven't figured out email marketing yet for my startup, but I'll give Kiela a try. Love open source, and would rather pay for emails then contacts. And mailchimp sucks.
walrus01 2y ago
I particularly thought this part was really fascinating, where they start complaining about a EMAIL SPAM SPECIALIST COMPANY which uses, surprise surprise, shady email marketing list sign-up tactics. It does what it says on the label, as the saying goes. "5. Scammy Email Tactics Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""
somid3 2y ago
What about https://sendy.co https://sendy.co -- 1 million is about $100
- stephenr 2y ago
  Sendy is an absolute atrocity of software. It's like you gave 1000 monkeys access to stack overflow with two buttons - one to copy and one to paste, then you trained an LLM on the garbage they produce, and then you asked the same monkeys to write a prompt for the LLM to write an email campaign manager... Seriously Sendy is without a doubt the worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of reading the source code, ever. It makes Wordpress look like a well architected marvel of software engineering. Sendy takes the hyperbole about junior developers copy and pasting code they don't understand to whole new levels.
tagawa 2y ago
Sad to not see a mention of tracking, i.e. the ability to disable open-tracking or click-tracking. Some services even have it disabled by default to respect subscribers’ privacy but sadly they weren’t included in the article. Some examples: Buttondown, Mailcoach, SendStack. No affiliation, I just researched them in the past (https://blog.daniemon.com/2022/11/15/privacy-first-newsletters-transactional-emails/ https://blog.daniemon.com/2022/11/15/privacy-first-newslette...)
_HMCB_ 2y ago
I’ve been with MailerLite for close to five years. I agree with his findings.
Devolver 2y ago
Surprised not to see Bento on the consideration list. Maybe not (yet) well known, but gives Customer.io a run for its money and pricing is great.
more_corn 2y ago
I think you misspelled spam.
iammrpayments 2y ago
I was expecting OP to trash Klaviyo, since I had a really bad experience with how expensive they get if you click the wrong button and choose to be charged based on your email list size, only to find out that the market is filled with bad examples like that.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Thanks, it was an interesting read. It's a shame MailChimp became so scammy, they used to be okay. I guess they are trying to squeeze every penny out of their customers, disregarding any reputational damage. Btw you look like Finnish actor Pekka Strang.
Sytten 2y ago
I didnt find any email marketing platform that made sense pricing wise for a B2C product with a free tier. They all get stupidly expensive even if most of your customers wont read the email and likely won't pay you anything. Same problem as the authentication space that charge per logged-in user.
- pembrook 2y ago
  Your deliverability is going to be trash in Gmail if you’re keeping a bunch of free users who don’t open your emails on your list. Email is expensive on purpose to incent customers into following good practices. Otherwise you attract all the worst customers (“let’s email everybody who’s ever interacted with us for a decade, regardless of if they want our emails!”). Then Gmail starts putting all emails sent on the cheap platforms IPs to spam by default. Based on your practices, it sounds like these pricing models are doing their job of correctly scaring you away.
  - HWR_14 2y ago
    I am questioning this because I don't understand, not because I believe you are wrong. But why would whether the emails are opened or not matter? Is there a reference for best email practices you recommend?
    - pembrook 2y ago
      This is just basic email deliverability 101 stuff. Gmail's algorithm has really tightened up this year. Open your spam folder right now and you'll probably see more than a few legit businesses in there. Basically if your engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, complaints, etc as a percentage of total sends) is poor enough, Gmail will dump you in spam by default. They don't just "trust" that you have permission to email the people you're emailing. So many businesses abuse this, and they're incentivized to keep your inbox clean so you keep visiting your inbox (and click those Gmail ads!). If you're getting low/declining engagement over time the algo just assumes you have poor sending practices, which to be honest, if that's happening, you probably do.
_asciiker_ 2y ago
Sentopia.net (https://www.sentopia.net https://www.sentopia.net) here, we do not charge per subscriber or contact, just deliveries, and can be as low as $0.0007 :)
alexashka 2y ago
This may be off topic but how hard is it to setup amazon simple email service and send out emails for close to 0$/mo by comparison? Are these websites doing something other than a pretty UI for AWS SES for non technical folks?
- manishsharan 2y ago
  This. I have been searching for SES on this discussion and nobody seems to be using it except perhaps you and I. My email marketing costs are a fraction of all the providers listed in the article thanks to AWS SES. And building a small custom solution with AWS SES APIs is almost trivial.
- tester457 2y ago
  Pretty UI with automations are all these websites seem to be. I'm leaning towards using AWS SES and Mautic for automation. Mautic is open source and can replace these overpriced UIs.
deleted 2y ago
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jordanmorgan10 2y ago
Can’t agree with MailerLite. I have 6,000 subscribers and literally all I want to do is send them an email maybe once a month, along with: - An API to sign up to the list - A welcome email automation That’s all. And I pay like $700 annually for that. When they sent me an email the other day of all of the features my plan has - none (not one!) applied to what I actually use it for! I don’t need ecom functions, a website builder, AI, none of that. I’m frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a product for me.
aleksiy123 2y ago
Anyone know something self hosted + compatible with AWS ses?
- human_llm 2y ago
  We use mailster with AWS SES and it works quite well. We have a lot of subscribers but don't send a lot of e-mails, so the cost of other solutions is ridiculous to me. https://mailster.co/ https://mailster.co/
- kennydude 2y ago
  https://www.mailcoach.app/ https://www.mailcoach.app/ Mailcoach by Spatie (who work on a lot of really good Laravel open source stuff) seems decent at this. You can either pay for a self-hosted license, or use their cloud.
tiffanyh 2y ago
Seems odd that 4 out-of-the 5 criteria are price related, and only 1 of 5 is related to how good the actual product is. This post seems less about “trying every email marketing tool” to actually just being about “what’s the cheapest tool”.
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  The cheapest tool is Flodesk. Not MailerLite or Brevo.
  - teruakohatu 2y ago
    Do you know how Flodesk does it so cheaply?
hambos22 2y ago
I want to share my experience with D2C (direct to client) brand email marketing. Initially, I was creating HTML emails with react-email and sending them through Postmark's broadcast stream. The open rates were very good - 40-50%, and it had solid deliverability. When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder. This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps. I spent 5 days building a custom solution with: - Simple drag-and-drop email builder - Dynamic coupon generation with dynamic criterias - Template variables - SQL-based segmentation (<-- priceless!) - Automated flows (abandoned carts, welcome series, etc..) -SMS integration I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too. Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.
farnoud 2y ago
I am not sure if this report is accurate and not biased. Brevo is so bad both in terms of quality of service and support. trust me, I was working with Brevo for 4 years!
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  Oh very interesting. I’d love to learn more — any specific thing you’d suggest I look at?
- rammer 2y ago
  Amazing just more proof that op of flawed
rammer 2y ago
Affiliate marketing spam listicle, presented as something that it's not. Just spam..
rsoto 2y ago
Great article, it must have been a lot of work (I've been on the very same road), so I'd do the same with some affiliate links. I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.
mbenchi10 2y ago
Thank you for taking the time to review all these email marketing tools. In my honest opinion, it really does not matter which one you use. Aside from the feature and price differences, I consider them to be small details. What you want to focus on is providing valuable education in each email, and being consistent. An Educational Email Course is a great example of this.
thih9 2y ago
I especially like the naming and shaming of the user unfriendly pricing tactics. This feels like the appropriate way of fighting dark patterns.
rammer 2y ago
Change the title to I checked out a few email marketing tools and here's the one that pays me the biggest and the longest affiliate commissions. Sneaky, I almost trusted this til I reached the comments that this just another pretty looking affiliate spam
himjessie 2y ago
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himjessie 2y ago
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ColonelBlimp 2y ago
I thought that having your website/article on the frontpage of Hacker News was good news. I guess I was wrong.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

I love the idea of a breakdown like this, but so many of the author's deal-killers are not relevant for most startups (the audience here). This is more of a list of solo freelancers.

steve-benjamins 2y ago
That’s fair. Any specifics?
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  Just to add this wasn’t written from the perspective of a solo freelancer. I’m part a 4-person startup (Atlist.com)

greedylizard 2y ago

This is very relevant to my industry (escape rooms). Our mailing lists quickly reach 10,000+ and unsubscribes happen often. I was so focused on deliverability with Mailchimp that I didn’t realize (until I just checked) that I’ve been paying for 2,000 unsubscribers. I had assumed I wasn’t. Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Strongly considering MailerLite now.

Hizonner 2y ago
> Deleting them would have moved me down a tier. Presumably it would also have lost your record of the fact that they'd already asked to not get your email. So you'd have added them back to the spam list if they ever dealt with you again, so they'd have to unsubscribe again. Spam has gotten so normalized that not only are people not even pretending to get opt-ins, but they don't see why they should have to pay any real attention to opt-outs. Yes, you are a spammer, and so are most of the businesses on the Internet at this point.
kyleee 2y ago
You can archive users when they unsub to avoid them counting towards your billable total
- steve-benjamins 2y ago
  Do you have to manually do this or can it be automated?
  - kyleee 2y ago
    It can be done via the api
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Manual afaict.

gmays 2y ago

Good analysis. One correction though, EmailOctopus does offer auto-plan downgrades. Screenshot of the billing page on our account: https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP https://share.cleanshot.com/VJdQPrjP After trying a few also we ended up with EmailOctopus because of simplicity (we only send plain text emails) and cost. The trick was using their Connect [1] plans so it could send via our AWS account, which is cheaper (we pay $30/mo for the 10,0000 subscriber plan). I also tried Loops and wanted to love it since they're perfect for SaaS companies, but back when I tried them we just got a ton of spam subscribers since they didn't have any built-in mitigation, so our list (and cost) grew. But that was in their very early days, so I assume they've resolved it by now and I'd like to try them again at some point since they're much more modern and purpose-built for SaaS (and a YC company). [1] https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctopus-connect https://help.emailoctopus.com/article/161-what-is-emailoctop...

steve-benjamins 2y ago
Great point. Thanks for sharing. (I originally considered it “not automated” because it wasn’t on by default but that’s a bit harsh in hindsight. )
jonathanbull 2y ago
CEO of EmailOctopus here. I was just about to offer this clarification, so thanks for commenting! Confirming that we offer auto-plan downgrades (and if you prefer it to not be automatic, as a lot of people do, you can manually increase/decrease your tier at any time).
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I have a free account with you guys and your customer support has been top-notch, so thank you.

Terretta 2y ago

In the "you had one job" category of things to look at from an email marketing tool: What about email deliverability? Deliverability refers to the percentage of emails you send that actually make it into your contacts' inboxes. The tool you choose can impact deliverability. However, it’s a complex topic, and I won’t dive into the details here. If this is something you’re concerned about, there are experts far more knowledgeable than me who can explain it thoroughly. This ought to be disclaimed at the top instead of the end.

steve-benjamins 2y ago
I disagree. It’s a dimension of the decision, certainly not the “one thing” to look for. … unless you’re a spammer haha.
- Terretta 2y ago
  Or unless your emails matter to your customers, with you seeing them as individual names instead of spray and pray marketing. Deliverability is the single most important thing to reach individuals in the first place, even more critical to maintain the transactional or workflow email relationship. Anthropic right now has an issue where their "passwordless" emails go to junk for M365 customers (85% of SMBs in U.S.), people literally can't use the service since the email isn't delivered to the inbox. To your point, in a past gig helping thousands of businesses with turning contacts into not just buyers but fans, I discovered mass marketers don't really care about deliverability at the level of "every single communication must land with every person". At the same time, I learned customers you want to build a relationship with very much do care. Ever since, when evaluating these, I start there, even before price. How many communications, transactions, or workflows with a future buyer with intent are you willing to fail to connect? "You had one job" means the primary, not only, dimension. Yes, the primary job of a mailer is for the mail to get there. I agree there's lots more to look for as well!
  - Hizonner 2y ago
    That ("Anthropic's" deliverability issue) is a Microsoft issue. Don't normalize Microsoft's bad practices.

yanko 2y ago

You did not evaluate adobe marketo.

steve-benjamins 2y ago
True! Have you tried it? Any thoughts?
- layer8 2y ago
  Your main headline claims you tried every email marketing tool. (“Top” is only in the HN title, and even then I don’t know if Adobe Marketo doesn’t qualify as “top”.)
  - portaouflop 2y ago
    Every “top” marketing tool. Obviously it’s not possible to try all tools, there are probably thousands. “Top” is a subjective category so OP just evaluated most relevant tools probably.
    - layer8 2y ago
      As I already tried to point out, “top” is only in the HN title, not in the actual article title.
  - jeffgreco 2y ago
    Wow you're telling me he didn't try every one of 12,000 marketing tools that exist?
    - layer8 2y ago
      I’m telling you he’s being criticized for the hyperbole.

kweks 2y ago

Adding our recent experience with Klaviyo. Klaviyo charges by "profile". When paired with Shopify, it automatically imports / pulls customer information 5o it's servers even when the customer specifically opted out of marketing. First month, we were debited 3500EU for opted-out profiles that they had auto-pulled, against the consent of customers and us. Even with the CEO looped in on emails, we had to threaten chargebacks before they refunded. They also refused to remove data under our official GDPR request.

frereubu 2y ago
That explains why that box hasn't worked when I've used Shopify stores before. I couldn't be bothered to take them to task individually, but I figured they were using some kind of crappy "legitimate interest" basis.
iammrpayments 2y ago
I don’t remember how, but you can lock in a lower tier plan and they will stop sending emails for the month once you hit that thresold. I have a small store that uses the free tier like this for automatic emails and when we need to send promotional emails we just use Shopify native email app which is 100x cheaper than klaviyo

simple10 2y ago

There's one tool worth mentioning that was missing from the list: High Level. It's commonly known and used in the agency and marketing world. Search for "go high level" on YouTube. Every marketer I know switched from ClickFunnels (reviewed in article) to High Level. It uses Mailgun on the backend for email delivery or can connect directly to SMTP. If you need a CRM with AI features, calendars, newsletters, funnels, etc. then High Level is worth considering. I've been using it for a couple years and love it. For startups, it's a cheaper alternative to HubSpot. https://gohighlevel.com/ https://gohighlevel.com/ For additional context, I've switched all my businesses and clients out of Mailchimp and Klaviyo to High Level.

HaZeust 2y ago
I used HighLevel for 2 years and have gone to the HL Summit. HighLevel is good, but it's a Zoho-burger: A mish-mashed suite of features, products, and toolset that each deliver a 6-7/10 rating on their own, with the promise of convenience by having those feature suites in 1 place. For those using HighLevel, they're usually saving up to use HubSpot for their clients as an agency or freelance marketer - as I did. HighLevel is just a budgetary HubSpot.

mtlynch 2y ago

I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended. Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most. And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program. The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons. [0] https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

thih9 2y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program. Do we know if that is the case?
- reddalo 2y ago
  Curiously, all the "best" apps have an affiliate link, and all the "rest" don't. Draw your own conclusions.
  - animex 2y ago
    coughwirecuttercough
  - steve-benjamins 2y ago
    Op here. That’s not even true! Loops is in “the best” and if doesnt have an affiliate link. All “the rest” have affiliate programs too… I was just lazy to sign up for them. Not everything is a conspiracy. The reality in this case is more mundane.

chevman 2y ago

A big driver of the right tool is your overall send volume and customer record count. Both of these will also influence pricing. Even for smaller shops, would recommend checking out some of the big players (eg Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, Twilio, etc) as they have entry level lower tiers that may end up costing less over time than some of these startup focused solutions (which all seem to nickel and dime you and hit you up with various types of overage charges), and will get you much higher deliverability, automation, and integration capabilities.

binarymax 2y ago

s/email marketing/spam/ Going to get downvoted for this - but I don’t know how spam is just considered OK and normal. We’re all bombarded with garbage every day. Managing my inbox is more annoying than ever. Just stop it already.

ghaff 2y ago
There are degrees of everything. Good luck with "If you build it they will come." Lots of people here hate advertising of any form as well. You need to promote things in some form in almost all cases.
- manishsharan 2y ago
  I use it to help drive engagement with the product for paying subscribers to introduce features that they have not used and invite them to training webinars.

araes 2y ago

Bachman has relevant commentary on marketing and companies like MailChimp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-Ir9WuI8-8

simple10 2y ago

Great article. Thanks for writing it all up. A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability. With bigger and more expensive email providers like Mailchimp, you're ultimately paying for higher deliverability. For startups just getting going with waiting list signups and newsletters, there are a few basic rules to staying out of the spam folder and Promotions tab. 1. Make sure SPF, DKIM and DMARC are setup properly 2. Always "warm up" a new domain and outbound email address Double opt-in where people have to either reply (highest signal) or click to confirm their email address tremendously helps warm up email. It's also important to slowly ramp up send volume over a few weeks or months and then keep send volume relatively consistent. 3. Consider using a warm up service that auto sends to and replies from an existing pool of recipient email addresses. It can help land your emails in the Primary inbox. 4. Watch out for shared IP addresses that end up on blacklists. If newsletters and emails are important to your biz growth, it's worth getting a dedicated IP address. Just be sure to warm it up properly. 5. Watch out for spam trigger words. Crypto, supplements, etc. It's an ever evolving list of words and phrases that bump up spam scores. Tools like https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ are useful for checking email config and spam scores.

Narciss 2y ago
Really good advice, thanks for this! Will be looking to do this for a new side project that I have going on and this helps to know what to look out for
rwmj 2y ago
> A followup article on deliverability would be helpful as many people seem to only have a surface level understanding of the difficulties of deliverability. How about never. Is never good for you?
technion 2y ago
It's not an issue of being too hard to understand. The moment I say "double opt in", marketing will decide I lack the skills to be involved in mail and deliverability will be placed in the hands of someone with a graphics design background that has never heard of dns. I've seen it in every single place I've tried to help marketing campaigns for over 20 years.

locallost 2y ago

If Brevo is one of the best, I am sceptical. I've had he displeasure of using it this year and the tools they offer are very iffy. But even ignoring that, the service is often down. I was often trying to edit a template, but it would not work because you keep getting a message like "something went wrong" and nothing gets displayed.

steve-benjamins 2y ago
Can you be specific about “iffy”? I’d be curious to know more.
- locallost 2y ago
  You can build kind of blocks that you use, but for anything more complex you're pretty much forced to use a kind of free HTML field, which of course is just a text field where you either suffer by editing html and their templating system in a browser text field (the templating is something Django compatible) or you copy and paste from your text editor which is also a form of torture. I've edited the wrong template on occasion, and saved it. Even if you just stick to their wysiwyg you still have to sometimes add conditional blocks and this also is for me anyway difficult. They have developer mode too, which is your email as a giant yaml. So they support a bunch of things, but personally I would not use it for anything except simple marketing campaigns. We do use it for that, but someone had the idea of having all customer emails go through it, and I don't really like it.

ctippett 2y ago

I don't have a horse in this race, but I came across Postmark[1] several years ago and thought to myself if I ever needed to send marketing emails — or transactional for that matter — I'd give them my business. They seem.. nice. Anyways, I'm surprised to not see them mentioned or considered at all. Did they fly under the radar or do I just have the wrong impression of them? [1] https://www.postmarkapp.com https://www.postmarkapp.com

mtlynch 2y ago
Postmark is owned by Active Campaign, which was included in OPs list, though I'm not sure how the Postmark product differs from the original Active Campaign product. I've been using Postmark for hobby projects for the past three years, and I've been happy with them, but my needs are super minimal - just sending out <100 emails per month programmatically where latency doesn't matter.
- cess11 2y ago
  A previous employer used Postmark around the time they got acquired, I recommended they find another supplier but left sometime after. Back then they were rather convenient and we didn't have any problems with tainted IP addresses, not sure if their new rather villainous owner has changed the Postmark business. I kind of expect them to pull IP addresses in through the email sending business to build reputation and then promote them to the ad delivery business.

JamesSwift 2y ago

The article is “I tried every top email marketing tool” and starts with eliminating a majority of the field based on an arbitrary rubric of what the author specifically is looking for. Then fails to compare essentially anything about the tools to provide any semblance of a useful review for any other person to consume for their own research. I have to agree with the other poster that this really just seems to be a reasonable attempt to get affiliate link click throughs.

steve-benjamins 2y ago
OP here. What would you compare the tools on? Be specific
- bitwarrior 2y ago
  I think the issue here is with the word "tried" and what that communicates. I think "compared" would be far more appropriate.
  - steve-benjamins 2y ago
    That’s fair! I actually “tried” more than the “elite 6” but I eliminated many of those tools for different reasons
- JamesSwift 2y ago
  Deliverability, price, pricing model, api/automation, UI, email builders, support, etc. The article is just “why we chose breva” and is very specific to you. As far as I can tell you didnt even use half of the offerings since they were ruled out purely due to pricing models. EDIT: just an example. If I wanted to know about sendgrid and how it compares, the only information this page gives me is “it has an overage charge”. How am I supposed to consume this article as an informative comparison?
  - steve-benjamins 2y ago
    … We didn’t choose Brevo. You didn’t even read the article!

malisper 2y ago

It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are: - Customer.io - Iterable - Braze - Marketo - Salesforce Marketing Cloud My understanding is Customer.io is what most startups use these days with larger companies using one of the other four.

fijiaarone 2y ago
$100/month for less than most mail providers offer free, and $1000/month for standard features is only for startups trying to burn money before they get off the runway.
AlexeyMK 2y ago
That is mostly right, with the caveat that customer.io is trying to go upmarket too now. https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/picking-your-lifecycle-marketing https://playbooks.hypergrowthpartners.com/p/picking-your-lif... I wrote this up about a year ago for a more comprehensive perspective for companies series A+

pentacent_hq 2y ago

Interesting point about charging for unsubscribed contacts! I am building an Open Source email marketing platform (https://www.keila.io https://www.keila.io) and our current pricing model only considers the amount of emails you send, not the number of contacts/subscribers. I've been thinking about switching to charging per contacts instead – and I probably wouldn't have considered not including unsubscribed contacts if they're still stored on the platform. But now I will, thanks!

fijiaarone 2y ago
I haven't figured out email marketing yet for my startup, but I'll give Kiela a try. Love open source, and would rather pay for emails then contacts. And mailchimp sucks.

walrus01 2y ago

I particularly thought this part was really fascinating, where they start complaining about a EMAIL SPAM SPECIALIST COMPANY which uses, surprise surprise, shady email marketing list sign-up tactics. It does what it says on the label, as the saying goes. "5. Scammy Email Tactics Then there’s their sneaky signup process. When creating an account, there’s a checkbox that reads: “By NOT checking this box, I agree to receive promotional emails.""

somid3 2y ago

What about https://sendy.co https://sendy.co -- 1 million is about $100

stephenr 2y ago
Sendy is an absolute atrocity of software. It's like you gave 1000 monkeys access to stack overflow with two buttons - one to copy and one to paste, then you trained an LLM on the garbage they produce, and then you asked the same monkeys to write a prompt for the LLM to write an email campaign manager... Seriously Sendy is without a doubt the worst piece of software I've ever had the displeasure of reading the source code, ever. It makes Wordpress look like a well architected marvel of software engineering. Sendy takes the hyperbole about junior developers copy and pasting code they don't understand to whole new levels.

tagawa 2y ago

Sad to not see a mention of tracking, i.e. the ability to disable open-tracking or click-tracking. Some services even have it disabled by default to respect subscribers’ privacy but sadly they weren’t included in the article. Some examples: Buttondown, Mailcoach, SendStack. No affiliation, I just researched them in the past (https://blog.daniemon.com/2022/11/15/privacy-first-newsletters-transactional-emails/ https://blog.daniemon.com/2022/11/15/privacy-first-newslette...)

_HMCB_ 2y ago

I’ve been with MailerLite for close to five years. I agree with his findings.

Devolver 2y ago

Surprised not to see Bento on the consideration list. Maybe not (yet) well known, but gives Customer.io a run for its money and pricing is great.

more_corn 2y ago

I think you misspelled spam.

iammrpayments 2y ago

I was expecting OP to trash Klaviyo, since I had a really bad experience with how expensive they get if you click the wrong button and choose to be charged based on your email list size, only to find out that the market is filled with bad examples like that.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Thanks, it was an interesting read. It's a shame MailChimp became so scammy, they used to be okay. I guess they are trying to squeeze every penny out of their customers, disregarding any reputational damage. Btw you look like Finnish actor Pekka Strang.

Sytten 2y ago

I didnt find any email marketing platform that made sense pricing wise for a B2C product with a free tier. They all get stupidly expensive even if most of your customers wont read the email and likely won't pay you anything. Same problem as the authentication space that charge per logged-in user.

pembrook 2y ago
Your deliverability is going to be trash in Gmail if you’re keeping a bunch of free users who don’t open your emails on your list. Email is expensive on purpose to incent customers into following good practices. Otherwise you attract all the worst customers (“let’s email everybody who’s ever interacted with us for a decade, regardless of if they want our emails!”). Then Gmail starts putting all emails sent on the cheap platforms IPs to spam by default. Based on your practices, it sounds like these pricing models are doing their job of correctly scaring you away.
- HWR_14 2y ago
  I am questioning this because I don't understand, not because I believe you are wrong. But why would whether the emails are opened or not matter? Is there a reference for best email practices you recommend?
  - pembrook 2y ago
    This is just basic email deliverability 101 stuff. Gmail's algorithm has really tightened up this year. Open your spam folder right now and you'll probably see more than a few legit businesses in there. Basically if your engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes, complaints, etc as a percentage of total sends) is poor enough, Gmail will dump you in spam by default. They don't just "trust" that you have permission to email the people you're emailing. So many businesses abuse this, and they're incentivized to keep your inbox clean so you keep visiting your inbox (and click those Gmail ads!). If you're getting low/declining engagement over time the algo just assumes you have poor sending practices, which to be honest, if that's happening, you probably do.

_asciiker_ 2y ago

Sentopia.net (https://www.sentopia.net https://www.sentopia.net) here, we do not charge per subscriber or contact, just deliveries, and can be as low as $0.0007 :)

alexashka 2y ago

This may be off topic but how hard is it to setup amazon simple email service and send out emails for close to 0$/mo by comparison? Are these websites doing something other than a pretty UI for AWS SES for non technical folks?

manishsharan 2y ago
This. I have been searching for SES on this discussion and nobody seems to be using it except perhaps you and I. My email marketing costs are a fraction of all the providers listed in the article thanks to AWS SES. And building a small custom solution with AWS SES APIs is almost trivial.
tester457 2y ago
Pretty UI with automations are all these websites seem to be. I'm leaning towards using AWS SES and Mautic for automation. Mautic is open source and can replace these overpriced UIs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jordanmorgan10 2y ago

Can’t agree with MailerLite. I have 6,000 subscribers and literally all I want to do is send them an email maybe once a month, along with: - An API to sign up to the list - A welcome email automation That’s all. And I pay like $700 annually for that. When they sent me an email the other day of all of the features my plan has - none (not one!) applied to what I actually use it for! I don’t need ecom functions, a website builder, AI, none of that. I’m frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be a product for me.

aleksiy123 2y ago

Anyone know something self hosted + compatible with AWS ses?

human_llm 2y ago
We use mailster with AWS SES and it works quite well. We have a lot of subscribers but don't send a lot of e-mails, so the cost of other solutions is ridiculous to me. https://mailster.co/ https://mailster.co/
kennydude 2y ago
https://www.mailcoach.app/ https://www.mailcoach.app/ Mailcoach by Spatie (who work on a lot of really good Laravel open source stuff) seems decent at this. You can either pay for a self-hosted license, or use their cloud.

tiffanyh 2y ago

Seems odd that 4 out-of-the 5 criteria are price related, and only 1 of 5 is related to how good the actual product is. This post seems less about “trying every email marketing tool” to actually just being about “what’s the cheapest tool”.

steve-benjamins 2y ago
The cheapest tool is Flodesk. Not MailerLite or Brevo.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  Do you know how Flodesk does it so cheaply?

hambos22 2y ago

I want to share my experience with D2C (direct to client) brand email marketing. Initially, I was creating HTML emails with react-email and sending them through Postmark's broadcast stream. The open rates were very good - 40-50%, and it had solid deliverability. When we wanted to improve our marketing automation, I decided to try Klaviyo because many people online recommended it. I spent around 500 euros and 3-4 days to integrate it with my custom ecommerce platform. After sending 2 campaigns, the open rate dropped to 15%. Later I discovered Klaviyo put us on a shared IP with not-so-good senders, so my emails were going to spam folder. This made me think - how difficult would it be to build some of Klaviyo's features myself? Especially because I was already collecting customer behavior data like item views and checkout steps. I spent 5 days building a custom solution with: - Simple drag-and-drop email builder - Dynamic coupon generation with dynamic criterias - Template variables - SQL-based segmentation (<-- priceless!) - Automated flows (abandoned carts, welcome series, etc..) -SMS integration I connected everything to Postmark and used their webhooks for analytics (opens, clicks, spam). Now I have a good in-house email marketing system that costs only $20 per month on Postmark, and my open rates are back to normal, as the profits too. Sometimes the "simple" (hah) solution is the best one.

farnoud 2y ago

I am not sure if this report is accurate and not biased. Brevo is so bad both in terms of quality of service and support. trust me, I was working with Brevo for 4 years!

steve-benjamins 2y ago
Oh very interesting. I’d love to learn more — any specific thing you’d suggest I look at?
rammer 2y ago
Amazing just more proof that op of flawed

rammer 2y ago

Affiliate marketing spam listicle, presented as something that it's not. Just spam..

rsoto 2y ago

Great article, it must have been a lot of work (I've been on the very same road), so I'd do the same with some affiliate links. I ran away from Mailchimp more than 5 years ago when they started with their shenanigans and arrived at the same conclusion: Mailerlite is great. I used to have lots of respect for Mailchimp for being a bootstrapped business and never taking investor money but once they sold their soul, it was game over. One thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that Mailchimp has been moving from an email marketing SaaS to a marketing platform SaaS. From a quick glance at their services, they now offer a website builder, a CRM, ads retargeting, social media integrations---and as a customer, you end up paying for every single feature, regardless of if you want it or not.

mbenchi10 2y ago

Thank you for taking the time to review all these email marketing tools. In my honest opinion, it really does not matter which one you use. Aside from the feature and price differences, I consider them to be small details. What you want to focus on is providing valuable education in each email, and being consistent. An Educational Email Course is a great example of this.

thih9 2y ago

I especially like the naming and shaming of the user unfriendly pricing tactics. This feels like the appropriate way of fighting dark patterns.

rammer 2y ago

Change the title to I checked out a few email marketing tools and here's the one that pays me the biggest and the longest affiliate commissions. Sneaky, I almost trusted this til I reached the comments that this just another pretty looking affiliate spam

himjessie 2y ago

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himjessie 2y ago

[dead]

ColonelBlimp 2y ago

I thought that having your website/article on the frontpage of Hacker News was good news. I guess I was wrong.