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Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

carlchenet.com

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Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#41

Post by tstrimple »

Zababa wrote: post #35
tashoecraft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An engineer should recognize what is worth their time. If setting this up takes more than 5hour a year of time to setup and maintain then it’s not worth it. You’ll be wasting money

Not eveyone earns 100€ an hour, especially in Europe. The newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and in France 45/50k€ a year is a good salary. That's around 14/15€ an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of maintenance.

There are many ways to measure the cost of something like this, but a blind look at average salaries is probably the worst. It doesn't factor in overhead or opportunity cost. In most companies, having a developer spend a week on maintenance of a system which isn't a core business value doesn't make sense. They would be much better utilized on value added work. I guarantee you most engineers could delivery way more than $500 in savings in a week.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#42

Post by maddyboo »

Zababa wrote: post #35
tashoecraft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An engineer should recognize what is worth their time. If setting this up takes more than 5hour a year of time to setup and maintain then it’s not worth it. You’ll be wasting money

Not eveyone earns 100€ an hour, especially in Europe. The newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and in France 45/50k€ a year is a good salary. That's around 14/15€ an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of maintenance.

The cost to the company per engineer hour is significantly higher than the engineer’s hourly rate.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#43

Post by throwaway3699 »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #15
throayobviousl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of reasoning is how to tell the difference between a manager and an engineer :)

And then, it is not even your own solution, but AWS SES. I have been running mail servers for 20+ years, sending volumes that would have made me multiple times bancrupt if I was doing it via Mailchimp or SES.

You could email everyone on Earth for less than the salary of an engineer with SES.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#44

Post by Silhouette »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #23
stevehind wrote: post #3

For most reasonable applications that is basically a great advertisement for mailchimp, Eg if you rolled your own solution you’d only save eur 500 a year before accounting for the build and maintenance of your solution.

If you're in the EU you're also saving the GDPR fines. And the author probably saved 500 euros a year on a basic plan. But if you're on the top end plan you would save tens of thousands.

What GDPR fines are those, specifically?

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#45

Post by krono »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #24
ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #16

To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. The real advantage is to have control over your own infrastructure and ensure the privacy of your reader base. The drawback is having to monitor blocklists and the reputation of your server IP address.

> To send 4k emails a month a 1€/month VPS running Exim is enough and takes 1h to set up. You can use a VPS for web projects. For e-mail you'd want a dedicated server with a separate IP that is going to cost you €40/month. Yes it may take 1h to set up, but gaining reputation takes time - you definitely won't be able to reach all recipients within one hour of purchasing the server.

Absolutely overkill to have a metal server at that cost to send emails. A cheap VPS (which always comes with its own IP) is fine in most cases.

From experience I can confirm the reputation build-up requirement though. And all that reputation can get ruined by a single blacklisting - even if you manage to get the server de-listed later the damage is done.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#46

Post by ratww »

Silhouette wrote: post #44
that_guy_iain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in the EU you're also saving the GDPR fines. And the author probably saved 500 euros a year on a basic plan. But if you're on the top end plan you would save tens of thousands.

What GDPR fines are those, specifically?

EDIT: I misread the grandparent post.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#47

Post by windsignaling »

For those saying that this is a complicated solution: it is.

I started using Sendy with SES a few years ago and it was much easier to setup compared to this blog post.

Went from $120 / mo to pennies, + the initial cost of Sendy.

If you're a developer, it's worth it.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#48

Post by Zababa »

maddyboo wrote: post #42
Zababa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not eveyone earns 100€ an hour, especially in Europe. The newsletter has a French name ("Le courrier du Hacker"), and in France 45/50k€ a year is a good salary. That's around 14/15€ an hour. Which means ~33 hours a year of maintenance.

The cost to the company per engineer hour is significantly higher than the engineer’s hourly rate.

But this isn't a company, it's a newletter the author is running. It's important to consider the context of things. Here the only cost is opportunity cost, which I wouldn't know how to evaluate. On the other hand, they save 500€ a year, learned new skills and created content for their blog.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#49

Post by PurpleFoxy »

tashoecraft wrote: post #26
throayobviousl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of reasoning is how to tell the difference between a manager and an engineer :)

An engineer should recognize what is worth their time. If setting this up takes more than 5hour a year of time to setup and maintain then it’s not worth it. You’ll be wasting money

Depends who is paying. If it’s your own project then 5 hours of your own time might not be worth that much. If someone else is paying you then both options cost money and the equation changes.

Re: Switching from Mailchimp to open-source Mailtrain and AWS SES

#50

Post by bpodgursky »

yread wrote: post #34
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then, it is not even your own solution, but AWS SES. I have been running mail servers for 20+ years, sending volumes that would have made me multiple times bancrupt if I was doing it via Mailchimp or SES.

AWS SES is ~1$/10,000 emails. Are you the biggest spammer or just very very poor? Also, 20 years ago running your email server was way easier than now

At a previous job, all API errors were emailed to internal email lists.

The dev monitoring the API health kept track of system health by looking at the number of unread messages in his inbox. If the number of unread messages went up by So... I can definitely see how this is plausible, if not uh, "best practice".

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