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

Hi all! Excited to share cc.dev after months of work and refinement.

The idea for this product came from trying to do email marketing for my side project, CubeDesk, a site where Rubik's Cube enthusiasts can time themselves, race with one another, train algorithms — it's a fun niche!

With over 40k users, sending even a single campaign was becoming expensive with MailChimp. I knew AWS SES would be much cheaper, but it’s just an API with none of the other necessities you need for a robust email marketing platform.

Beyond cost, I was also frustrated with having to make sure my database was always in sync with MailChimp and the audience schema they enforced. If I wanted to email every user who had completed 10 solves, that would be a whole ordeal and eat up hours of my day.

So, I started (and am now launching):

https://cc.dev

cc.dev connects directly to your database and lets you write SQL queries to target your audience. It's backed by AWS SES, so the cost to send emails is significantly less than what you're used to seeing. Combined with a template builder, media management, and campaign monitoring, cc.dev is meant to be your final destination whenever you need to send marketing emails to your users.

Would love to hear your feedback on this! If you're interested in trying out cc.dev as your email marketing platform, shoot me an email and let's have a chat: kash at cc.dev

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

I see a lot of security concerns with this.

Many, if not all databases are not public accessible, nor should they ever be. Asking people to open their database up to you, sketchy and dangerous.

Very legitimate concern and one I've been thinking about a lot. Honestly, I think the best way to address this is to just go open source, which I'm totally open to. I think once I've validated the idea a bit and know it's something people are interested in, I'll focus on this issue and come up with a solution (whether it's open sourcing or something else)

Agreed. This makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I'd rather a simple SDK that pushes the contact details to their API.

If you send through Cloudflare Workers using MailChannels, the sending is free with no cap.