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Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

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Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#31

Post by D13Fd »

prepend wrote: post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

Honestly I have no problem with monthly fees for software you use every day, or frequently, for professional use. I'm fine paying monthly for things like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, and 1Password. Those are all desktop apps, albeit with a cloud component that I mostly don't use. I easily get my money back 10x over (likely more) based on the income I generate with the apps.

The pricing here seems targeted at media folks who do e-mail creation for a living. Assuming it works well, it's likely a bargain for them as well. But I have to imagine that market is rather small.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#32

Post by tgv »

dnh44 wrote: post #18
ponytech wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not a web app then?

This is just a guess but if it were a web app then they'd have to support multiple browsers.

But they have to support multiple mail clients anyway: macOS Mail is based on Webkit, Thunderbird on Gecko (Firefox), I guess it's Blink for many Android clients, and then there's a hundred versions of Outlook.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#33

Post by iamacyborg »

cies wrote: post #12

MJML deserves a mention. We use it, together with mustache, to let users create their own mailings from some building blocks we offer. Works quite well!

There's also Parcel which is a dedicated email code editor.

https://www.useparcel.com

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#34

Post by jacurtis »

prepend wrote: post #13

This is desktop software, why is there a monthly fee? I occasionally want to send “nice looking” emails but get asked by lots of comms people about it. Recommending a monthly fee service is a non starter, but buying some software is pretty easy to decide. “Should I pay once? Or pay forever?” Is there anything in the functionality that takes advantage of SaaS? Other than updates and whatnot? Of course the price/value…

Like anything, this is a matter of perspective. The right team would find value in it. I used to manage a marketing team at a large e-commerce company and we spent tens of thousands a month in email design fees. We rotated through a group of freelancers to design emails. Even an email that was simply following one of our "tried-and-true" templates still would cost us $400 - $500 or so for a single email. That is just updating message content on an existing email.

So when you think about this for $20 a month. It's a no-brainer in that scenario. We already have on-staff copywriters, marketing devs, social media managers, and so on that could have taken over some of the emails using this.

I might still out-source major custom email designs for huge promotions and stuff. But we could easily handle smaller flash sale and other simple emails internally, using a tool like this. So $20 could be justified even if it saved us from outsourcing one email a month.

For the average blogger, $20 a month could still be worth it if it they have a decent email lists and are converting profit from that list.

If you are just running a personal blog and want to send out fun emails to your list of 100 people, it probably isn't worth it. But most ESPs also have WYSIWYG designers that would be "good enough". If you are somewhat-technical then a tool like MJML would probably offer even more than the above tool offers, while being free.

I don't think Microsoft365 is a fair comparison. One is a mass-market product, the other is a niche indie product. $20/mo isn't for everyone. But at $240 a year, that's less than the cost of out-sourcing a single email every year. So if you can make 1 email a month from it, then you are clearly coming out far ahead.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#36

Post by D13Fd »

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #9

HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Fo…

It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn't updated the Outlook desktop app to use the rendering engine from Edge rather than the 10+-year-old IE engine. That would resolve so many e-mail rendering issues. I imagine it must be due to security concerns.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#38

Post by D13Fd »

inetknght wrote: post #30

Any HTML email that arrives to my inbox is usually marked as spam and phishing. Emails need to be clear and concise. HTML facilitates far too much hidden shit.

Interesting take given that they are used by millions of people every day.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#39

Post by Ashanmaril »

dubcanada wrote: post #27
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #9

HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Fo…

I guess that's sort of what AMP is.

I didn't even know that was a thing until the other day where I saw someone post on Twitter that they got an email that had basically a web storefront within the email. It was selling some product and it had a color selector and cart, the whole thing. I assume the checkout process would kick you to their actual website but it's still kinda crazy.

Re: Show HN: Mail Studio – IDE for designing responsive emails

#40

Post by meehow »

D13Fd wrote: post #36
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #9

HTML in email is legacy hell. I wonder if someone wants to create a new MIME-type like text/html+css, and clients who want can implement it. In theory you could have representations of the message like video/mpeg4 and text/plain, and depending on the client capabilities and configuration, the receiver could watch a video or read plain text. The information content of the 2 (or more) don't even have to be the same! Fo…

It boggles my mind that Microsoft hasn't updated the Outlook desktop app to use the rendering engine from Edge rather than the 10+-year-old IE engine. That would resolve so many e-mail rendering issues. I imagine it must be due to security concerns.

Outlook comes with MS Office, so it's must render HTML with MS Word. Super logical ;)
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