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Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

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Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#91
post #19

Major problem with this is that your customers should ideally never expose their databases for public access.

Any serious database nowadays uses TLS and client certificates, at which point "exposing" the database is using the exact same crypto library that a VPN or jump host or what have you would use, and is just as secure.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emails are sent using your own AWS SES account, which will handle all of that. No real concern of people sending spam because they would be damaging their own SES reputation.

This is only true if you are using dedicated IPs with SES (~$30/month each). However, SES is pretty good at managing IP reputation even for the shared IP service, and I haven't had any issues in over 10 years of building systems on top of it.

But have you had issues when sending SES emails to Outlook/Hotmail clients? For some reason those clients block emails coming from SES

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#93

If I have SES and MJML and the SQL query - why not just run this on my app server? Why pay you to hit the SES API with my markup? I don't quite get it.

Because you don't have to build a feature in your own software that

- stores the templates

- selectively runs campaigns and tracks open rates etc

- create campaigns, see how many users are in there, have a safeguard before you hit "send"

- actually a nice interface.

Let's assume the "open my database to the internet" is not a dealbreaker, then this tool gets your development cost of 1-8 weeks (depends on how big the code base is) down to a 19 USD / m. Depending on where you hire / how much your time is, your opportunity cost of several thousand dollars for the feature are now much smaller.

I think there's a niche but strong case for this.

[edit: typo]

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only true if you are using dedicated IPs with SES (~$30/month each). However, SES is pretty good at managing IP reputation even for the shared IP service, and I haven't had any issues in over 10 years of building systems on top of it.

But have you had issues when sending SES emails to Outlook/Hotmail clients? For some reason those clients block emails coming from SES

That’s because you have to pay Microsoft to send marketing email at any real volume to their services.

Typically via ReturnPath. It’s basically a scam, but everyone pays for it.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#98
I really like this. I'm an engineer, and have had to build basic versions of this internally at a previous company, and we never managed the investment to make it work nicely. This would have been a great option for us. We had an SQL database with all the data in it, and we used MJML for our emails. The only thing was that we had a fairly complex Sendgrid setup to ensure good deliverability at relatively large email scale.

However. I don't think we'd have paid for this as a SaaS service. These sorts of tools could be engineering or marketing led. We had some marketing-led tools that were fairly hands-off from engineering, but they didn't connect to our database. We happily paid for these services. However this would have been engineering led, and we'd have wanted to self-host given how it worked.

Just my 2c, but I'd either keep it engineering-targeted, open source it, and make money on support, or change tack a bit to target at the marketing folks.

And a feature request: "linting" emails. We ended up with manual checklists for things like: do all the links resolve, do they have tracking tokens, is the plaintext preview good, is there an unsubscribe link. Linting for these would be a great productivity boost.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#99
I wish this "connect to my DB" architecture was more common in SaaS. I don't want to write synchronization code or extra APIs. Synchronization always gets out of sync anyway. I just want to set appropriate permissions for what different parties can see and do in my database.

Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database

#100
post #78

Just want to chime in directly against the flow of negative comments re: security and say two things: 1) I too am exactly in your target audience and I'm psyched to check this out (I'm the solo tech operator of an ecom business and this will exactly scratch an itch I have) 2) I'll echo what I wrote in another comment: It is VERY HN to get concerned about exposing databases, and folks who are posting about the securit…

How hard is it to have an API with reasonable RBAC? Why does it NEED database access?

It's more about owning your data.
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