Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy • Hacker News Board

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#41

Post by jszymborski » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:11 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #40

IgorPartola wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

When you see the word "campaign" associated with email, it means "marketing campaign", which means spam. Canada is having a crackdown on spam. "CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians" ... "Compu-Finder sent commercial electronic messages without the recipient’s consent as well as emails in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function prope…

marketing campaign =/= spam.

The Canadian laws (despite being irrelevant in this conversation) prevent against e-mails _without consent_ and _without unsubscribe mechanisms_. Coincidentally, those are the same requirements of 99% of all blacklists and spam tools that differentiate spam from marketing campaigns.

By your definition, MailChimp is a spam tool too.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#42

Post by pedrosorren1 » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

ing33k wrote: post #29

pdeuchler wrote: post #6

shameless plug Or you could just use the free Sendgrid plan for up to 12k emails a month :)

Isn't Sendgrid only for sending transactional emails ?

No we also have a newsletter tool and several of our clients send marketing emails with us.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#43

Post by jmhobbs » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:43 PM UTC

The Sendy codebase is horrifying. It's not good. Buyer beware.

EDIT I realized I made a blanket claim and didn't provide any details. So I'll try to explain.

No framework, little shared code between files. Warnings and deprecations ignored, poor variable names, db queries mixed right in with html output, user id's imploded from array and stored into a single database field, etc.

Just lots and lots of rough PHP.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#44

Post by wallflower » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:58 PM UTC

> Forewarning: remember how I asked you earlier if you were feeling bold?

This is going to be the part that scares most people away. But you are ready. You can do this. We're in this together, and with the power of two we can do anything! Besides, all you really need is to be good at following linear instructions.

I really like how you are coaching the reader through the 'instruction manual' stuff.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#45

Post by Zaheer » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 9:59 PM UTC

yahelc wrote: post #16

This can be $0/month if you host your Sendy install on Heroku instead of DigitalOcean (as I do). Worth noting that with Amazon SES, if you want to send more than 10,000 emails in a day, you'll need to apply (to Amazon) for approval.

Does hosting on heroku scale well? Have you written on this - would be interested in learning more about your setup.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#46

Post by coderdude » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

moe wrote: post #17

coderdude wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. There are too many spammers using it. ISPs seem to barely trust mail sent from their servers and I get a lot of bounces. I stopped using it for critical email and rely on it only for bulk-type emails where missing that one email isn't the end of the world. MailChimp for newsletters and SendGrid for everything else. That's a winning c…

Amazon SES rocks from a pricing standpoint but deliverability isn't its strong suit. Huh? Are you sure you have configured it correctly, including DKIM? We're using SES a lot (both transactional and campaigns) and never had a problem with deliverability. There are too many spammers using it. That seems unlikely considering the default sending limit is a mere 10k mails/day (iirc) and I doubt Amazon lets you raise that…

I didn't configure DKIM for SES. I configured it for SendGrid right out the gate but it was made more obvious that it was an important next step. I wasn't even aware that SES supported DKIM at the time of testing. It's an important factor that I admittedly overlooked.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#47

Post by Moto7451 » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 10:09 PM UTC

desheikh wrote: post #9

shameless plug I built SimplerSES for the same reason - a cheaper alternative to MailChimp using AWS SES. It's built as a hosted service so theres no server costs, and you only pay for the emails you send out.

This looks great. The biggest pain we had with MailChimp was dealing with unsubscribes from our website (i.e. anything other than an unsubscribe link in the email). How does your API handle unsubscribes? Do you simply upload a complete list of users each time and those not in the file are removed?

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#48

Post by xux » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 10:47 PM UTC

I've used Mailchimp and Sendy extensively. I send about 200k-300k emails a month. Here are the pros and cons:

Mailchimp: if price isn't an issue for you, use Mailchimp. Period. The deliverability and customer service is unmatched. The interface is easy to use. No setup. High customization with merge tags. If you're sending a lot of emails and want them to "just get delivered without any hassle", use this.

Sendy: it's a lighter version of Mailchimp and super cheap. Much less customization. No live support (but the guy responds to his email really fast and always helpful). Configuration is a bit painful (you have to setup SES, wait 1-2 days for domain approval, install Sendy, etc), but once you set it up, it's a breeze to use. I haven't noticed any deliverability issues, but supposedly it's less reliable than more established email senders. If you just run a personal newsletter.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#49

Post by joshmn » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 11:00 PM UTC

jmhobbs wrote: post #43

The Sendy codebase is horrifying. It's not good. Buyer beware. EDIT I realized I made a blanket claim and didn't provide any details. So I'll try to explain. No framework, little shared code between files. Warnings and deprecations ignored, poor variable names, db queries mixed right in with html output, user id's imploded from array and stored into a single database field, etc. Just lots and lots of rough PHP.

While I can't provide an accurate basis for this, from the sounds of it, I imagine that Sendy wasn't originally intended for "traditional marketing" emails.

Re: Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy

#50

Post by aaronem » Thu, Mar 05, 2015, 11:06 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #41

Animats wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you see the word "campaign" associated with email, it means "marketing campaign", which means spam. Canada is having a crackdown on spam. "CRTC Chief Compliance and Enforcement Officer issues $1.1 million penalty to Compu-Finder for spamming Canadians" ... "Compu-Finder sent commercial electronic messages without the recipient’s consent as well as emails in which the unsubscribe mechanisms did not function prope…

marketing campaign =/= spam. The Canadian laws (despite being irrelevant in this conversation) prevent against e-mails _without consent_ and _without unsubscribe mechanisms_. Coincidentally, those are the same requirements of 99% of all blacklists and spam tools that differentiate spam from marketing campaigns. By your definition, MailChimp is a spam tool too.

I get the impression that, by his definition, very nearly everything is a spam tool.