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Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
- rbinv 12y agoThis is ridiculous. You don't only pay MailChimp for the software, you pay for their deliverability.
- davekiss 12y agoSendy uses Amazon SES as the delivery service, not a PHP installation. Highly deliverable and much more cost effective.
- coderdude 12y agoAmazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world. MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning combo.
- timdorr 12y agoI find Mandrill, the backend service behind Mailchimp, a better option. They're much cheaper than SendGrid and even cheaper than SES in large quantities. And their deliverability is top notch.
- pixeloution 12y agoMandrill is not "the backend service behind MailChimp". Mandrill came after MailChimp and is a separate thing - they only allow it to be used for transactional email. Sending a newsletter via Mandrill violates its Terms of Service.
- jtreminio 12y agoI just went through Mandrill's TOS [0] and didn't see anything referencing a ban on emailing lists. From my understanding, and having used Mandrill for some time, it can be used for anything you want (that follows its double opt-in, no spam requirements). [0] https://mandrill.com/terms/ https://mandrill.com/terms/
- Freyale 12y agoJust to back this person up, on Mandrills account page it states: "Use Mandrill to send automated one-to-one email like password resets and welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters." Emphasis on the "as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters" section there. https://mandrill.com/about/ https://mandrill.com/about/ The difference of Mandril is that is doesn't have all the fancy features of Mailchip that people "would expect" to create a newsletter etc so Mandril is aimed at developers/software etc. That does not mean you can not use it for same uses as Mailchimp though.
- hboon 12y agoIt's been 3 years, but there was word from MailChimp that that is ok: "Yes - you can use Mandrill for newsletters" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4132375
- moe 12y agoAmazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. Huh? Are you sure you have configured it correctly, including DKIM? We're using SES a lot (both transactional and campaigns) and never had a problem with deliverability. There are too many spammers using it. That seems unlikely considering the default sending limit is a mere 10k mails/day (iirc) and I doubt Amazon lets you raise that when your complaint-inbox is overflowing...
- coderdude 12y agoI didn't configure DKIM for SES. I configured it for SendGrid right out the gate but it was made more obvious that it was an important next step. I wasn't even aware that SES supported DKIM at the time of testing. It's an important factor that I admittedly overlooked.
- bradleyland 12y agoAmazon's own emails regularly get caught in our mail's (Google Apps) spam filter, so I'm skeptical of SES's ability to match MailChimp's level of deliverability.
- bhouston 12y agoAs a use of both SES, and MailChimp (as well as SendGrid for transactional) for https://Clara.io https://Clara.io I find no difference between SES and MailChimp regarding delivery. It would be cool to see an objective study here. Otherwise it seems like FUD.
- cpncrunch 12y agoI don't use either, but I have to deal with spammers from both. The difference is that Mailchimp has a zero tolerance policy to abuse, whereas SES doesn't.
- WA 12y agoAnd yet, MailChimp, AWeber and all the big names constantly end in my spam folder first. I don't use Gmail, so maybe that's why. The delivery rates of the big ones could be overrated.
- bhouston 12y agoI switched away from MailChimp to Sendy and it is way cheaper. MailChimp is stupidly expensive, annoyingly so, and it doesn't add much value over Sendy.
- _neil 12y agoThat's a bit over the top. Mail chimp is hugely valuable if you are in their target user base. And for non-technical clients, mail chimp is (imo) a massive step up from other mailing list providers.
- bhouston 12y agoIf you have 100,000 users (which we have), MailChimp is really expensive. Details: http://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/ http://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/ Mailchimp is thus $475.00 per 100K per month ($5700 per year!) That is a lot to spend on just email. With Sendy + SES it costs me $10 to do a send to our 100,000 users. Now I could play around with switching plans all the time at MailChimp to try and always minimize my costs, but I don't want to play that game. SES + Sendy keeps my costs linear with the number of emails I send, I don't have to play any games with changing plans, and it is significantly cheaper that MailChimp.
- robbiemitchell 12y agoIf I'm reading the FAQ correct, SES maxes out at 10k emails/day, meaning it'll take you 10 days to email your entire list.
- bhouston 12y agohttp://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request-production-access.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/request... http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/manage-sending-limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/manage-...
- neudabei 12y ago
- Someone1234 12y agoSending directly from a Digital Ocean VPS? Yeah good luck with that bounce rate. I use SendGrid free on Azure because Azure VPS too have an extremely high bounce rate. Setting up an SMTP server isn't exactly hard or expensive (regardless of if you're integrating mailing lists or not), it is the good rep' IP address and making it "someone else's problem" to deal with a lot of email related problems (poor reputation, blacklists, random host decides to block you, etc) that you're paying for. Sendgrid, Mailchimp, and so on primarily exist so you can just hit send and then that's as deep as your involvement goes as far as emails.
- _neil 12y agoIt's using Amazon SES for delivery.
- geoka9 12y ago> Sending directly from a Digital Ocean VPS? Yeah good luck with that bounce rate. I do. Gmail spam-flagged the messages for a while, but after a couple of months it learned they're not spam. Surprisingly, other email providers (yahoo, ms, aol) never batted an eye. I just made sure that the IP address assigned to my droplet is not in any blacklist, and configured proper SPF/DKIM headers (not hard with postfix).
- pdeuchler 12y agoshameless plug Or you could just use the free Sendgrid plan for up to 12k emails a month :)
- SuperKlaus 12y agoOr you could avoid doing business with Sendgrid and use mailgun or mailjet.
- pbowyer 12y agoFinally someone mentioning these! I've used Sendgrid, but I love Mailgun.
- StavrosK 12y agoYeah what the hell, I had to ctrl-f for it. I don't know why so many people are recommending SendGrid, MailGun is awesome, great UI, a breeze to integrate and it's pretty much free for a startup (first 10k mails free). I just love those guys. They even check that you installed everything correctly for you.
- ing33k 12y agoIsn't Sendgrid only for sending transactional emails ?
- pedrosorren1 12y agoNo we also have a newsletter tool and several of our clients send marketing emails with us.
- desheikh 12y agoshameless plug I built SimplerSES for the same reason - a cheaper alternative to MailChimp using AWS SES. It's built as a hosted service so theres no server costs, and you only pay for the emails you send out.
- raphar 12y agodont be ashamed! All the OP links have affiliates codes. (namecheap, digital ocean, sendy).
- desheikh 12y agoHaha, thanks. I've been growing pretty well organically, but still feel a little odd pitching my service online. I should just set up a referral program myself and let others do it for me :p
- Moto7451 12y agoThis looks great. The biggest pain we had with MailChimp was dealing with unsubscribes from our website (i.e. anything other than an unsubscribe link in the email). How does your API handle unsubscribes? Do you simply upload a complete list of users each time and those not in the file are removed?
- desheikh 12y agoFrom what I understand you need an API endpoint to unsubscribe users from your list. Try out the service and drop me a line, I'm sure I can accommodate your use case :)
- michaelq 12y agoThis looks like a great value. We were considering using Campaign.js, but actually getting it up and running on a server to fire out campaigns seemed like a pain (as does using sendy). Combining the affordability of SES with some symbolance of the UX of mailchimp seems like a killer value proposition.
- 12y ago
- joelrunyon 12y agoCheckout Converkit by Nathan Barry (he's in HN quite frequently). http://convertkit.com http://convertkit.com Great alternative (sort of like aweber with good design & active development + a focus on building autoresponders).
- angelbob 12y agoIf these guys are worried about the price of MailChimp, ConvertKit is likely to give them conniptions. It's designed for "full featured" more than "cheap."
- yahelc 12y agoThis can be $0/month if you host your Sendy install on Heroku instead of DigitalOcean (as I do). Worth noting that with Amazon SES, if you want to send more than 10,000 emails in a day, you'll need to apply (to Amazon) for approval.
- Zaheer 12y agoDoes hosting on heroku scale well? Have you written on this - would be interested in learning more about your setup.
- michilehr 12y agoWe have also switched to sendy months ago and I love it. No problems with spam reports yet.
- Animats 12y agoThis article is a spam from a spammer for a spamming tool, aimed at other spammers.
- IgorPartola 12y agoHow so?
- Animats 12y agoWhen you see the word "campaign" associated with email, it means "marketing campaign", which means spam. Canada is having a crackdown on spam. "CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians" ... "Compu-Finder sent commercial electronic messages without the recipient’s consent as well as emails in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function properly. The emails sent by Compu-Finder promoted various training courses to businesses, often related to topics such as management, social media and professional development." The next time you consider "informing people about your webinar" via email, remember that. [1] http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=944159 http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=944159
- jszymborski 12y agomarketing campaign =/= spam. The Canadian laws (despite being irrelevant in this conversation) prevent against e-mails _without consent_ and _without unsubscribe mechanisms_. Coincidentally, those are the same requirements of 99% of all blacklists and spam tools that differentiate spam from marketing campaigns. By your definition, MailChimp is a spam tool too.
- aaronem 12y agoI get the impression that, by his definition, very nearly everything is a spam tool.
- snowwrestler 12y agoIt is a seemingly immutable law of HN that any discussion of email marketing must include at least one person complaining that all marketing emails are spam.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- SuperKlaus 12y agomailkimp
- jaysonelliot 12y agoWe've got about 12,000 people on our announce list. I switched us over to Sendy three months ago. It doesn't have the slick, "just works" appeal of MailChimp, but it also doesn't carry the big monthly price tag. We've had the same open and clickthrough rates with Sendy as before, and I haven't encountered any problems getting marked as spam. That said, our entire list is people who actively came to the site and signed up for updates. If price were no object, we'd go back to MailChimp in a heartbeat. But they were charging us $125/month just to keep our mailing list on the service, whether we sent anything that month or not. Just not a good use of funds for us at this stage. Sendy is great at our current size.
- cglee 12y agoAre you sure that's true? Doesn't Mailchimp have a per-per-credit alternative to their recurring monthly pricing?
- elif 12y agoyes there is pay-as-you-go and alternatively you can suspend monthly billing.
- detaro 12y agoThey have, but it would cost the GP $240 per mailing to all 12.000 users (0.02 per mail). 12.000 mails on Amazon SES are only slightly above 1$ (+ Sendy hosting of course). So the question is if Mailchimp offers features that save them 200$ worth of time.
- JonoBB 12y agoWe switched to Sendy too, because MailChimp's pricing leaves a lot to be desired. We have a list of about 10k subscribers, and we only send a campaign every 2-3 months. I have no idea why this is priced way higher than someone with 1k subscribers would sends 4 campaigns a month. Sendy has worked perfectly for us. The UI could do with a lot of love, but its functionally fine.
- epa 12y ago
- Zaheer 12y agoSendy is awesome and for non-technical people it is even easier and still has enormous cost savings to use a fully managed Sendy hosting provider. I use SendyHosting.com and it's worked great in my 2ish years of use with over 50k subscribers: My referral link: http://www.sendyhosting.com/?utm_source=tagsforlikes&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=referral http://www.sendyhosting.com/?utm_source=tagsforlikes&utm_med... link: http://www.sendyhosting.com http://www.sendyhosting.com
- jmhobbs 12y agoThe Sendy codebase is horrifying. It's not good. Buyer beware. EDIT I realized I made a blanket claim and didn't provide any details. So I'll try to explain. No framework, little shared code between files. Warnings and deprecations ignored, poor variable names, db queries mixed right in with html output, user id's imploded from array and stored into a single database field, etc. Just lots and lots of rough PHP.
- joshmn 12y agoWhile I can't provide an accurate basis for this, from the sounds of it, I imagine that Sendy wasn't originally intended for "traditional marketing" emails.
- equalarrow 12y agoGimmie a break... This isn't software to be used for analysis. Sendy is f-in awesome! I've used it for a list of over 25k and it hasn't failed me once. Like others have said, it's not as brain dead as Mailchimp, but I wasn't expecting it to be. The developer is great and it just works(tm). The price is awesome too. I looked through the source and thought, sure, it's not computer science that was built on the latest "Framework X", but it worked fine. To me it signaled, they we're just getting shit done. God, I'm so over the days of analysis paralysis "proper framework" development (that's for another rant I guess). Please, pay no mind to the parent post. If you're looking for an alternative to AWeber (I'm not saying it's got as many features as Aweber) or Mailchimp, then Sendy is awesome. I've been hosting mine on a Digital Ocean 1GB server for about 7 months and it's worked flawlessly. Their 2.0 upgrade went without a hitch. Couldn't recommend this app more.
- onion2k 12y agoA poor codebase makes it hard to audit it to make sure there aren't bugs or exploits. In the case of Sendy, how would a user know that a spammer isn't able to exploit it to send spam to everyone in Sendy's MySQL database? That's potentially very damaging to a business (especially if you're running Sendy on behalf of a client). Sending email to a list is easy. Sending email to a list securely is harder.
- 12y ago
- wallflower 12y ago> Forewarning: remember how I asked you earlier if you were feeling bold? This is going to be the part that scares most people away. But you are ready. You can do this. We're in this together, and with the power of two we can do anything! Besides, all you really need is to be good at following linear instructions. I really like how you are coaching the reader through the 'instruction manual' stuff.
- xux 12y agoI've used Mailchimp and Sendy extensively. I send about 200k-300k emails a month. Here are the pros and cons: Mailchimp: if price isn't an issue for you, use Mailchimp. Period. The deliverability and customer service is unmatched. The interface is easy to use. No setup. High customization with merge tags. If you're sending a lot of emails and want them to "just get delivered without any hassle", use this. Sendy: it's a lighter version of Mailchimp and super cheap. Much less customization. No live support (but the guy responds to his email really fast and always helpful). Configuration is a bit painful (you have to setup SES, wait 1-2 days for domain approval, install Sendy, etc), but once you set it up, it's a breeze to use. I haven't noticed any deliverability issues, but supposedly it's less reliable than more established email senders. If you just run a personal newsletter.
- mplewis 12y agoI don't pay MailChimp for the dashboard, I pay them to guarantee my mail is delivered. DIY mail delivery is a nightmare.
- jonathanbull 12y agoanother shameless plug If you're looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, please take a look at a project I've been working on for the last year or so: https://emailoctopus.com https://emailoctopus.com We're not currently charging anything (still working out a pricing model!) so you only have to pay your SES fees. And as it's hosted on EC2 instances, you'll still get your first 62,000 emails a month under Amazon's free tier.
- ashray 12y agoThis looks awesome! Do you have bounce handling built into this?
- jonathanbull 12y agoThanks! Yes, we have full bounce and complaint handling.
- gotrythis 12y agoTo buck the trend here, I was using Sendy, and switched (for now) to MailChimp. I would stick with Sendy, but I could never get the unsubscribe links to work, and it doesn't automatically insert any footers, like a spam compliance. Also, there was no way to edit someone's email who was on multiple lists, without checking each list to see if they were on it, and manually editing, which was taking me hours. Couldn't do it through the API either. Their support is great for what seems like a one-man show. My Internet marketing friends suggest going with the self-hosted mailing software, OEMPro, and setting it up to work with SendGrid. They say SendGrid vets and ages their IPs before giving them to you, so they provide better deliver rates than MailChimp, though you need to do some custom integration to clean your list of bounces, etc. However, OEMPro has the WORST support I've ever encountered. I was a client with them a decade ago and left in frustration because of their support, and found it to be just as bad in 2015, when it took them 3 months to let me know I wasn't eligible for the upgrade price.
- gotrythis 12y agoAfter writing this, I logged in, see there is a version 2 of Sendy, which appears to fix all these problems. Assuming I can get the unsubscribe to work, I'll switch back.
- arbuge 12y agoI also migrated away from mailchimp recently. Similar situation - I had a list with around 3000 subscribers, growing around 1,000 per month. In the end I went even cheaper than the author and chose PHPlist. Free and also works with Amazon SES. Working out the correct settings took some trial and error but it works like a charm now.
- superflit 12y agoSorry but if you are taking all the trouble to install Sendy you should look at Mandrill [1]. I use their python api, hooked a Django project with Html editor (ckeditor) and bang. Magic Formula = Django + Mandrill app + django-ckeditor Sending more than 1 000 000 mails by month (reaching 1.7M now). It is fast, it works. The main problem: to reach the support you should use twitter and talk to the monkey. [1] - https://www.mandrill.com/ https://www.mandrill.com/
- nodesocket 12y agoMandrill is great, we use it at https://commando.io https://commando.io, but it is geared toward transactional emails (notifications), not newsletters.
- nodesocket 12y agoNice solution to save money, but for a company that is making money, $75 or $100 a month to MailChimp is well worth it. Beyond the time it will take you setup a server, configure it, and install Sendy, there is a huge limitation with SES: 10,000/24hrs at a rate of 5 emails per second. If your list is decent sized, say 50,000 it would take over 2.5 hours to send your newsletter. Beyond that, MailChimp deals with IP whitelisting, blacklisting, scalability, SPF, DKIM, and the bevy of other e-mail sending nightmares.
- bhouston 12y agoYou can apply to get higher send limits. It just starts at 10000. They have limits to frustrate spammers.
- arikrak 12y agoI used Mailchimp until I had 4,000 subscribers, and then I switched to my own service, but used their cheap Mandrill service for the actual email sending.
- brianbarker 12y agoHehe, the post is full of referral links to Sendy.
- captn3m0 12y agoHas nobody here heard of tinyletter[0]. Its a side-service by MailChimp and offers newsletters for upto 5k subscribers for free. It has some basic analytics as well and has a really nice interface. If you just want a small announce mailing list, you might give it a try. [0]: http://tinyletter.com/ http://tinyletter.com/
- ankitpr89 12y agoA well written post by Dave. But for a marketer, technology part is tricky, when it comes to installing Sendy the right way with Amazon SES server. I have been using EasySendy service for past few months and they are absolutely wonderful Sendy managed hosting service.