This looks like an interesting take on email marketing. I use an open source solution called Listmonk (w/ Amazon SES) for my emailing needs. How does this project compare?
Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
71–80 of 105 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a public facing database, but using an IP address allow-list to restrict access is pretty secure. cc should publish the IP addresses they use.
It’s listed on the Data page! No need to open the database up to the whole internet. Just whitelist one IP.
Doesn't matter. The database still is on a public subnet on customer's network. All it takes is for someone to jack up some kind of white list or access rule and the entire database is exposed. It's an attack vector. You can't do this nearly as easily when the database is in a private subnet w/ no access to internet.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#73I 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 au…
The target market is someone who 1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users 2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive 3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this s…
Sendy (https://sendy.co/) ticks all those boxes, plus it is self-hosted, so I don't need to share my database with anyone.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s listed on the Data page! No need to open the database up to the whole internet. Just whitelist one IP.
Doesn't matter. The database still is on a public subnet on customer's network. All it takes is for someone to jack up some kind of white list or access rule and the entire database is exposed. It's an attack vector. You can't do this nearly as easily when the database is in a private subnet w/ no access to internet.
I mostly agree, but do want to emphasize that it really depends and there are multiple ways to secure this that range in complexity and maintenance overhead.
The top thing that comes to mind is creating a separate ‘read replica’ DB that logically replicates target table(s) from the source DB, creates a materialized view with a subset of the replicated data in the replica db, and then exposes only the materialized view to a specific 3rd party user.
That way you:
1) Run your primary db in a private subnet — addressing your concern with ip whitelisting
2) Run the replica in a public subnet with extremely limited access(ip-whitelisting and limited access controls to data).
This is definitely a more complex setup to reason about and creates more moving parts that can fall out of sync, but it does greatly decrease the blast radius of a breach, and for some orgs, that may be a worthwhile trade-off. In my opinion, the OP would probably benefit from some basic security walkthroughs on these different implementations to help engineering teams get onboarded/make a better case for their solution if they hit friction with legal or security teams.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#75fwiw I've been looking to find a MailChimp or such alternative that's FOSS.
I've both tried ListMonk and Bespoke but both lack on features I might need.
Might just roll my own at this point lmao
https://github.com/knadh/listmonk https://listmonk.app
https://bespoke.surf/ https://github.com/bespoke-surf/bespoke
The aspect most important for me regarding this as an european based company is to be GDPR compilant so opt-in storing ip address and datetime is required by law.
What /i try to convey by this is that sending emails might be easy, but all the work around doing so lawfully is painfully burecractically comically hard.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s listed on the Data page! No need to open the database up to the whole internet. Just whitelist one IP.
Doesn't matter. The database still is on a public subnet on customer's network. All it takes is for someone to jack up some kind of white list or access rule and the entire database is exposed. It's an attack vector. You can't do this nearly as easily when the database is in a private subnet w/ no access to internet.
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#77Major problem with this is that your customers should ideally never expose their databases for public access.
Second devil's advocate here: I know this isn't necessarily "good" in terms of security, but it's a very common pattern for higher-level tools these days to connect directly to databases. A LOT of marketing/analytics tools support this seemingly because users want this (see: Customer.IO, Looker, etc.)
So again, I'm not saying you're wrong in that this might be a bad security practice, but OP is not alone in taking this approach and many SaaS vendors are seeing success and getting users because of it. So OP is going down a trodden path.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#78Just 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 security concerns are not wrong, per se, but also, you are going down a path that many other SaaS apps have successfully gone down, and it's a feature users want and will pay for. So while you should absolutely make sure this is done properly and advise your users not just to expose their databases willy-nilly, don't get psyched out by folks telling you it's a hard no to have to connect a DB directly. Users want this, will pay for it, and you're wise for doing it.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#79Just 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…
> Users want this
The customers of those users absolutely do not want this. If I ever find out a company uses something like this, I'll no longer be doing business with them.
> So while you should absolutely make sure this is done properly
That is simply not possible.
Re: Show HN: I made a MailChimp alternative that connects to your database
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The target market is someone who 1. is tech-savvy and runs an app/service with a bunch of users 2. has tried existing emailing platforms and feel that they're too expensive 3. wants full freedom of who they target their emails to A tech-savvy person could make their own solution, and that's what I wanted to do with my site CubeDesk, but it's surprisingly difficult and time-consuming, which gave me the idea for this s…
Sendy ( https://sendy.co/ ) ticks all those boxes, plus it is self-hosted, so I don't need to share my database with anyone.
Oh, one-time-fee products are so much better for users!