This does seem cool. When the service matures, are you going to eventually move it to production?
Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
21–30 of 105 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#22I think there are some good ideas here, but the target audience imho is not clear.
Email marketing cheaper is a great attention grabber: kudos for the good copywriting.
Step 1: Link to AWS SES... humm, for that your target audience must be tech-savvy.
Step 2: Query your database... humm, linking my database to a strange system? No freaking way! But assume for an instant that this would be ok. For this, your target audience again must be tech-savvy.
Step 3: Create an email template using MJML... again, for tech-savvy people, not for the average digital marketeer...
Step 4: Review and send... ok, pretty basic..
English -> SQL. Here you got me confused. For steps 1, 2 and 3, your audience must be tech-savvy. This feature doesn't make any sense for tech-savvy people. It only makes sense for the average marketeer in a small team (or solopreneur) who doesn't know SQL. But this guy would never get through steps 1, 2 and 3!
See my point?
A tech-savvy person in a tight budget would develop his own solution. Imho, not your target.
An average digital marketeer or solopreneur who doesn't know how to code and is in a tight budget could be your audience. But for that, steps 1-3 must be no-code/for dummies.
The greatest thing about the idea is "email marketing cheaper".
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#23This looks great! Sounds like you track events like opens, clicks SES features..
does that mean you need a specific table in my database?
What data about my users would be stored in your database, vs my database?
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#24I 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.
Yeah what’s the hesitation for having an API?
I think even more interesting is that they chose to forgo the rather robust and easy to use API offered by Mailchimp in the first place.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Definitely taking all the security measures I can, but you're right, things can go wrong. I do encourage (and would like to enforce) that db credentials provided should have very limited read access to only the tables/columns that the user wants to query. Having said that, it's totally understandable that some orgs won't want do open up their db. The idea with going open source would be that they can host the platfor…
You dont need to go open source to allow self hosting, and, youll likely lose money that way. Its entirely possible to allow self hosting without being open source. Plenty of other projects do it. That being said, self hosting doesnt solve all issues. You, and whoever uses this product, will need MANY IPs because of blacklisting and throttling limits applied almost worldwide to all mail servers. Theres a reason why t…
You realize that the sending is done by Amazon SES right?
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#26> 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. Could you explain why this was such a problem? It would seem like this (API to submit data) is the sensible way to balance the cost against the security concerns raised in the other comment. Does mean engineering and sync issues which your solution does address in an inter…
There can be a lot of complexities in syncing a user model into an email platform if it doesn’t match your business model.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#27This feels like a very small step up from just doing everything in my codebase.
My SES is already setup. I have templating for emails already. I can query my DB using my ORM without grant additional access. I guess I get the benefits of your UI for monitoring.
I'm really not sure if the net positive is large enough for me to consider the solution.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah what’s the hesitation for having an API?
I think even more interesting is that they chose to forgo the rather robust and easy to use API offered by Mailchimp in the first place.
Mailchimp have already exposed customer user data. Controlling the integration in this way is likely more secure, not less.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#29Nice to see another entrant in this space, there are still very few platforms that allow you to do this and it’s, IMO, a real differentiator.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#30I 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)
I was super excited when this popped up because I'm looking into solutions for this problem right now. I was, however, surprised to see it wasn't self-hosted or open source.
As others have mentioned, there are security issues here that would be a non-starter for me. Even just having to open a database to the open internet for an external service to connect to is too much, even if I trusted that service completely.
Self-hosted fixes these issues since outbound traffic can be locked down so only connections to SES are allowed, and no databases have to be exposed to the internet.
However, many people will also not want more than 1 service talking directly to a database for a few reasons:
1. Databases are often a single point of failure. A bad query can take down a whole service. Allowing queries that don't pass code review can be dangerous here, even if it's locked down to be read-only. This can be mitigated by talking to replica databases, but that's more setup.
2. Migrations on data that is accessed directly from multiple services becomes harder. Many server frameworks handle data migrations, and they assume ownership of the data. These frameworks cannot account for other services and cannot make sure the queries will continue to work. This is less of an issue if the query is a one-off though.
3. Having multiple services talk directly to a database pushes all the security, data validation and processing to the database. Many developers (myself included) prefer to keep database configuration as simple as possible since they are already complex.
Anyway, sorry for the long post, but I thought my experience might be useful in developing this! Generally, I'd love to see a simple, self-hosted MailChimp. Especially one where I could keep all the configuration in version control.