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Sendy - Send Newsletters via Amazon SES
- cmer 14y agoThis looks great! If I buy it, are updates included? Do you have a demo we can play with? Can we send multipart emails? Thanks!
- sendy 14y agoYes updates are included until the next major version, just like desktop apps. And yes you can send multipart emails. :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ceejayoz 14y agoI like the looks of this. Any chance of a read-only demo to poke around in?
- ljd 14y agoI second that, I like the product and would love a demo.
- sawyer 14y agoHow is Mailchimp $200 / 10,000 emails? With their monthly plans you send unlimited (to a limited number of people in your list).
- ceejayoz 14y agoI imagine it's based on their pay-as-you-go plan.
- eli 14y agoTrue, using the pay as you go price is slightly bogus because I'm sure most people sending newsletters would be better off with a monthly plan. But it depends on how frequently you send messages, I guess. The monthly price is still $75/mo (and at 10,001 addresses it's $150/mo).
- eli 14y agoVery cool. I've been waiting for someone to add a layer on SES for sending newsletters instead of transactional emails. The only bummer with SES for serious newsletter folks is that you can't get a dedicated IP address.
- ceejayoz 14y agoSome argue that dedicated IPs aren't all that important: http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/14127210172/the-false-promises-of-dedicated-ips http://blog.postmarkapp.com/post/14127210172/the-false-promi...
- eli 14y agoInteresting link. I agree that perhaps the value is sometimes overstated and I agree that we are moving towards domain-based reputation, but I've personally been bitten by other customers getting my shared IP on a blacklist. While it's true that ISPs and spam filters will take the reputation of neighboring IPs into account, surely having a dedicated IP insulates you from the actions of others better than sharing the exact same address as them. I agree with the bottom line, though: use an ESP that has a low tolerance for shenanigans.
- ceejayoz 14y agoPresumably, systems like SES have direct lines to the major ISPs, and religiously monitor the blacklists. I'd imagine any affected IPs get pulled out of the pool within a minute of going on any of the major lists. If the provider is responsive to spam, you've probably got more benefit from their IP block being considered very safe than you'd get from a dedicated IP, and having a dedicated IP doesn't protect you from your ISP's entire range getting flagged if someone else in it goes on a rampage.
- alexknowshtml 14y agoDisclosure: I used to work at Postmark. ISPs are way more interested in maintaining relationships with ESPs that keep junk from getting to them in the first place than the ones that "quickly fix once the damage is done". It's one case where "asking for forgiveness" isn't preferred over the more careful approach. SES is more like outsourcing sendmail on your own server so you don't carry the burden of maintaining/securing it, except that you don't have control over it when something goes wrong and you have the same lack of customer support if you don't know how to fix it. If you value your messages getting to the inbox, it's the least desirable option. For sending low-value emails, though, go nuts!
- nhebb 14y agoI noticed a reference to .htaccess in the Get Stared Guide. Can this be configured to run on nginx?
- ceejayoz 14y agoI can't speak for the app, but I've yet to discover a .htaccess config that couldn't be converted to nginx.
- fomojola 14y agoA small point, but your API doesn't appear to use any kind of authentication/authorization: $handle = fopen("$sendy_url/subscribe/$sendy_email/$sendy_list/".str_replace(' ', '%20', $sendy_name).'/true', "r");`). In theory, anyone who knows you are using Sendy (I'll assume looking at the headers in the emails sent would reveal that) could subscribe/unsubscribe any email address and possibly wreak havoc. You should secure that somehow: either an authorization scheme or a secret or SOMETHING.
- wildmXranat 14y agoIf this is true, it's like a 'fun mode' for an API.
- stevencorona 14y agoVery cool. Would have been supercool if it could have all been implemented in JavaScript and hosted on S3 (with Dynamo for the list storage), though. Having to host a server makes it less appealing for me.
- ceejayoz 14y agoHow do you propose you'd track e-mail opens in such a setup?
- stevencorona 14y agoUse an image pixel on s3 + s3 access logs. Can't reply below- but you can use Elastic MapReduce or an EC2 instance I can boot up when I want to send mail. The point I'm getting at, is if I need to keep another LAMP setup running 24/7 ($10/mo), I might as well just save myself the headache and spend the extra $10/mo to use MailChimp.
- ceejayoz 14y agoOK, and what goes through the logs to make the pretty graphs?
- toomuchtodo 14y agoEither way you'd need an EC2 instance doing some work. No way to do it with just S3 and Dynamo.
- KaoruAoiShiho 14y agoYes you can, you can access Dynamo directly from the client. Javascript goes through the logs to make pretty graphs, it's fairly simple. That this app is in php is kind of a disappointment.
- stevencorona 14y agoIt's not that I don't want an instance doing some work, it's just that I don't want it running 24/7 (expensive) or having my opens/clicks depend on it. Much rather only have to pay for an hour of CPU time and do the processing the background.
- sendy 14y agoHey guys! Great to find a discussion here. Lots of people has been requesting a demo, we'll definitely put this up. And yes, free updates are included up to the next major version (just like desktop apps).
- evanwalsh 14y agoWhy should I use this over Mandrill? http://mandrill.com/ http://mandrill.com/
- ceejayoz 14y agoThat's transactional. Sendy is bulk and should be compared with MailChimp, not Mandrill.
- Kudos 14y agoMandrill's "mostly RESTful" API isn't remotely RESTful and only knows the POST HTTP verb.
- nodesocket 14y agoWow, Mandrill is significantly cheaper than postmarkapp who we use now. Anybody using Mandrill in production?
- argarg 14y agoGoing to use it to send a couple of thousand of emails with attachments like, tomorrow. Up to now it works great in my tests.
- hurrycane 14y agoDid you know that Amazon SES is built in Romania ? http://romania.amazon.com http://romania.amazon.com
- jicktroyat 14y agoThis is an awesome idea. I might be wrong but I thought Amazon SES was meant for transactional emails only. I browsed their FAQ and they never talk about email marketing. I don't think they will let you send multiple campaigns with an audience of more than 100.000 contacts.
- ceejayoz 14y agohttp://aws.amazon.com/ses/ http://aws.amazon.com/ses/ > Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers.
- trimbo 14y agoThey'll do bulk. In fact, they will do all of the things normal bulk senders will do... dedicated IPs and such. They don't have any UI though, which will make it hard for most email marketers.
- duck 14y agoDisclaimer: I use MailChimp for Hacker Newsletter and Wayback Letter I guess it depends what type of newsletter you're sending out, but pricing is hardly the reason I would pick one solution over another when it comes to sending out emails. The features and deliverability that someone like MailChimp provides is really invaluable if your newsletter is an important part of your business. That being said, I always like the idea of a self-hosted solution as an option in any segment and I'm sure there is a market for something exactly like this.
- MicahWedemeyer 14y agoMailchimp gets brutally expensive at the higher tiers, especially if you have a large list but only send 1 or 2 newsletters a month. We switched to sendgrid for our newsletters even though their interface is not as nice. Their pay-per-delivery pricing fit our model much better than the pay-per-subscriber.
- sudonim 14y agoOther than spammers, who is concerned about sending email newsletters cheaper? Your service looks like a great tool, but I'd encourage you to ask your early users why they like using you. I'd guess that "It's cheaper than mailchimp" won't be the answer you hear. + You don't really want to tout yourself as the low-cost-option. You have nowhere to go but down.
- hemancuso 14y agoPaying mail chimp $150 a month to manage sending to a list of 25k users or more is a cost many folk would prefer not to have. I doubt this is any sort of take over the world project for the author, but it's certainly a useful project that I think many folk would be happy to compensate him for.
- jeff18 14y agoSending to 1,000,000 subscribers costs $55,000+ per year on MailChimp and other premium services. A cheaper option with the same deliverability would be extremely attractive to anyone who doesn't like setting their money on fire!
- bherms 14y agoExactly this... People seem to jump on the bandwagon of SaaS services and don't really realize that, as a business, you should be trying to minimize expenses and maximize profit. Granted there is flexibility here in the products you use -- ie, the feature/cost tradeoff needs to make sense, but the fact remains, every $1 of money the company saves helps the company last longer, increases its chance at a future, and benefits both the employees and investors (if there are any). People seem to get sidetracked in our industry a lot of times on this startup mantra that makes people feel like their company is a failure if it doesn't buy everyone an Aeron, have a quirky office in SOMA, and utilize all the hot startup tech services that exist.
- sudonim 14y agoYour biggest expense as a company is employees. Every purchasing decision that won't keep you alive for another month is a decision that isn't worth thinking about. "I could switch from A to B and save $100 a month". Each human being in your startup costs $5000 - $10,000 a month in salary excl. benefits. Saving $150 a month on mailchimp is chump change.
- magic5227 14y agoWould be nice to get a sense of how this handles large volumes. I would be wary to try this for anything serious as it might not be set up properly for large volumes 100k, 500k etc. Maybe speaking to this concern would help business.
- chadyj 14y agoAs the founder of a new email company, actually sending emails is the baseline and assumed part of any ESP service. Whilst deliverability is absolutely important it is assumed that a professional service has this covered. The real value I have seen is in managing the world beyond deliverability, especially in composition and content creation, design, subscriber management, better workflows for editors/developers/designs, innovative data-friendly tools, and above all features that drive metrics.
- chrowe 14y agoI'd like to see some actual high-volume tests done with SES, anyone got any links to something like this? I've Googled — nothing.