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

#81

Post by neudabei » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 9:22 AM UTC

robbiemitchell wrote: post #24

bhouston wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have 100,000 users (which we have), MailChimp is really expensive. Details: http://mailchimp.com/pricing/high-volume/ Mailchimp is thus $475.00 per 100K per month ($5700 per year!) That is a lot to spend on just email. With Sendy + SES it costs me $10 to do a send to our 100,000 users. Now I could play around with switching plans all the time at MailChimp to try and always minimize my costs, but I don't want t…

If I'm reading the FAQ correct, SES maxes out at 10k emails/day, meaning it'll take you 10 days to email your entire list.

That's just in the beginning. As your volume increases and your stats are ok (low bounces and complaints) you can ask for a quota increase (+ speed increase) which is usually granted. It'll take a few days until you are up and running with a bigger list.

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

#82

Post by neudabei » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 9:31 AM UTC

mudil wrote: post #11

bhouston wrote: post #4

I switched away from MailChimp to Sendy and it is way cheaper. MailChimp is stupidly expensive, annoyingly so, and it doesn't add much value over Sendy.

What's your experience with Sendy? Please let us know!

I have been using it for almost 1.5 years and really like it. It takes a moment to set up and has way less features than Mailchimp (less third party integrations, segmentation features etc.), but the price is awesome and Amazon SES is also very cheap. I haven't been using it with Digital Ocean (so don't know how well that works).

Amazon SES also has very good IPs. If you check them on https://senderscore.org you will see they usually rank above 95%. The only problem is Amazon SES strict policy against bounces and complaints. So your list has to be very clean and ideally double opt-in before you can send. Also Amazon SES starts you out with 10k emails/day and 5emails/sec. You need to ask for a quota increase (which was always granted in my experience) before sending higher volume faster.

My tip: If you have some old/invalid emails that you know will cause problems with Amazon SES, send to your most active (recent openers and clickers) first and then gradually introduce your older emails. Monitor your bounce and complaint rates to stay below 5% and 0.1% respectively.

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

#83

Post by ofir_geller » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 9:52 AM 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.

Ideas: since you are competing on the price. add a graph showing emails/payment growing with you and mail-chimp/other strong competition side by side. next to it say "lowers is,of course, better." then you have to attack the main objection(IMHO), lower delivery rate. not sure how but you need to think about the "no one ever got fired for chosing IBM" affect and counter it. you can say something reassuring about SES. or have a quote from a user or two.

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

#84

Post by avinassh » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 9:54 AM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #63

superflit wrote: post #61

Sorry but if you are taking all the trouble to install Sendy you should look at Mandrill [1]. I use their python api, hooked a Django project with Html editor (ckeditor) and bang. Magic Formula = Django + Mandrill app + django-ckeditor Sending more than 1 000 000 mails by month (reaching 1.7M now). It is fast, it works. The main problem: to reach the support you should use twitter and talk to the monkey. [1] - https:…

Mandrill is great, we use it at https://commando.io , but it is geared toward transactional emails (notifications), not newsletters.

What is the difference? And how does it matter?

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

#85

Post by captn3m0 » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 11:30 AM UTC

Has nobody here heard of tinyletter[0]. Its a side-service by MailChimp and offers newsletters for upto 5k subscribers for free. It has some basic analytics as well and has a really nice interface. If you just want a small announce mailing list, you might give it a try.

[0]: http://tinyletter.com/

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

#86

Post by superflit » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 11:44 AM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #63

superflit wrote: post #61

Sorry but if you are taking all the trouble to install Sendy you should look at Mandrill [1]. I use their python api, hooked a Django project with Html editor (ckeditor) and bang. Magic Formula = Django + Mandrill app + django-ckeditor Sending more than 1 000 000 mails by month (reaching 1.7M now). It is fast, it works. The main problem: to reach the support you should use twitter and talk to the monkey. [1] - https:…

Mandrill is great, we use it at https://commando.io , but it is geared toward transactional emails (notifications), not newsletters.

Newsletter is a transaction that occurs every once in a while.

:)

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

#87

Post by bradleyland » Fri, Mar 06, 2015, 9:05 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…

Amazon's own emails regularly get caught in our mail's (Google Apps) spam filter, so I'm skeptical of SES's ability to match MailChimp's level of deliverability.

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

#88

Post by jonathanbull » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 11:50 AM UTC

ashray wrote: post #64

jonathanbull wrote: post #55

another shameless plug If you're looking for a hosted alternative to Sendy, please take a look at a project I've been working on for the last year or so: https://emailoctopus.com We're not currently charging anything (still working out a pricing model!) so you only have to pay your SES fees. And as it's hosted on EC2 instances, you'll still get your first 62,000 emails a month under Amazon's free tier.

This looks awesome! Do you have bounce handling built into this?

Thanks! Yes, we have full bounce and complaint handling.

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

#89

Post by WA » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 2:05 PM UTC

rbinv wrote: post #2

This is ridiculous. You don't only pay MailChimp for the software, you pay for their deliverability.

And yet, MailChimp, AWeber and all the big names constantly end in my spam folder first. I don't use Gmail, so maybe that's why.

The delivery rates of the big ones could be overrated.

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

#90

Post by jmhobbs » Tue, Mar 10, 2015, 2:38 AM UTC

equalarrow wrote: post #76

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.

Gimmie a break... This isn't software to be used for analysis. Sendy is f-in awesome! I've used it for a list of over 25k and it hasn't failed me once. Like others have said, it's not as brain dead as Mailchimp, but I wasn't expecting it to be. The developer is great and it just works(tm). The price is awesome too. I looked through the source and thought, sure, it's not computer science that was built on the latest "…

I'm late to the reply here, so sorry to have missed the discussion.

We use Sendy at work, 40k+ sends weekly. It saves us boat loads of money since moving from Mailchimp. It's a nice thing to have.

However, we had hoped to extend it's tooling and customize, but that's right out. I've rewritten the CSV import code because it reads in the entire file, twice, before processing. I found some bugs where it can silently drop lines of your import. That's not "f-n awesome", it's bad software.

These are real things. The default Sendy setup can drop tracking opens because it doesn't access it atomically. These aren't "computer science" issues, they are evidence of a lack of competent design.

We've forked it, patched it, and use it internally, but only because it's cheaper than writing our own, for now.

Don't dismiss warnings. I'm not telling you not to buy it, I'm telling you that the guts are shitty and you should know that before you fork over cash.